Young people significantly reduced the use of drugs in 2021. But the COVID-19 pandemic led to the rise in the use of nicotine products and the misuse of prescription medications.
These are the latest results from the Monitoring the Future survey, a long-term epidemiological study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
Monitoring the Future investigators collected 32,260 surveys from students enrolled across 319 public and private schools in the United States from February through June 2021. Adolescents decreased the use of many substances, including alcohol, vaped tobacco, and cannabis.
The percentage of eighth (13-14 years old), 10th (15-16 years old), and 12th (17-18 years old) graders students reporting using cannabis in 2020 decreased significantly in 2021.
In particular, eighth-grade students reduced cannabis use by 37.7%, while 10th graders by 38.2% and 12th graders by 13.3% compared with the 2020 survey’s results.
Alcohol, vaping nicotine, and other drugs other than cannabis use have also significantly decreased among young people.
A dramatic decrease in cannabis use
“We have never seen such dramatic decreases in drug use among teens in just one year. These data are unprecedented and highlight one unexpected potential consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused seismic shifts in the day-to-day lives of adolescents,” said in a press release Nora Volkow, M.D., NIDA director.
The latest findings confirm the decreasing trend of cannabis use among young people observed in other studies. Richard A. Miech, the study’s lead author, said the 2021 data illuminate how the COVID-19 pandemic may have impacted substance use among young people.
“In the coming years, we will find out whether those impacts are long-lasting as we continue tracking the drug use patterns of these unique cohorts of adolescents,” he said.
Another study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in August 2021, and funded by the NIDA and other institutes, showed that cannabis use remained relatively stable or even declined during the first wave of the pandemic as researchers surveyed more than 7,800 people ages 10 to 14 between September 2019 and August 2020.
Young people and the COVID-19 pandemic
However, researchers note that the decline of drug use among young people coincided with the rise of nicotine products and the misuse of prescription medications.
“Compared to pre-pandemic behavior, use of alcohol declined, but the use of nicotine or misuse of prescription drugs increased, perhaps, suggested researchers, because the latter are easier to hide when families were locked down together,” the study reads.
The study found that students across all age groups reported moderate increases in feelings of boredom, anxiety, depression, loneliness, worry, difficulty sleeping, and other negative mental health indicators since the beginning of the pandemic.
Although it is too early to assess the reasons behind the decrease of cannabis and other substance use among adolescents, some researchers say lack of access to supply during the pandemic may have affected the trend.
However, these latest results show that the cannabis decline in 2021 is part of a shift that caught on at the start of the pandemic when the restrictive measures were young people struggled to get cannabis supply.
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