US teen drug, alcohol and tobacco use continues to decline

Gaming and social media is the new addiction.

On the one hand, cigarettes are bad and everyone should quit. And alcohol should be used in moderation. And many drugs are very dangerous and addictive and should be avoided. So this is probably good.

On the other hand, if this means are just sitting home alone, maybe having parasocial relationships with influencers, that's sad.

Can't afford it probably 🤷‍♂️

Nah, here's the real reason. When I was the nightclubbing age, you could get a bottle of booze, 6 cans of coke and mineral water for like $50. Last time I went to a club, I paid $120 for the same thing. People in the 18-25 age range don't have $120 to drop every Friday.

“Drug use, particularly among adolescents, is typically a social event,” said Miech. “The social distancing policies during the pandemic were designed so that all teenagers and adolescents hardly interacted with anybody except their own immediate family.”

So… they don’t have friends? Very uplifting

Maybe smartphones and social media are a problem here. Running around buttnaked with penises drawn to you face isn't that fun anymore, if everyone can take a picture/video that might haunt you for decades. It's self-surveillance.

I’ll offer this as a possible reason: Kids don’t solo travel like they used to. Kids not wanting driver’s licenses as much is a thing.

I think I can speak for older generations a little - we couldn’t wait to get enough independence to have a bike or driver’s license to get out of the house. There was only the telephone to talk to people - as in no internet, no social media, not everyone had computer games or consoles. Eventually you had messaging services like AIM or IRC, but you didn’t really meet up with friends on them because not everyone had PCs, or cared to learn how to use one. There was cable TV if you were lucky, but you didn’t watch that all day. We went from one friend’s house to another, or friends of friend’s homes. You got exposed to a lot more living conditions, often while completely unsupervised. Bored kids or kids with home problems didn’t mind pilfering the alcohol from the parents, or got whatever drug they could. Usually pot. Nothing else to do. Plus some peer pressure.

Now? Kids text. They meet up online on discord or whatever VoIP or messaging service is cool right now. Group chats. Play online games. They don’t need to leave the house to hang out, and in-person hangouts seem way less important to my kids than it ever was to me when I was younger. That’s a lot less opportunity to be introduced to alcohol or other drugs and have the access to them.

So maybe less peer pressure isn’t necessarily a Covid result, it’s the result of social interaction moving to online spaces and not physical spaces where access to alcohol or other drugs are present.

I quit smoking a long time ago after many attempts. The key was to simply get poor enough that I simply couldn't afford it. Perhaps that's what we're seeing here.

Whenever I see one of these polls being published I imagine how I would have answered them when I was that age, and I would have lied about every negative seeming question.

What if the poll wasn't really anonymous and this data was going to be passed on to future employers or schools?

Nah they just broke. The system is not better it's worse.

But what if our teenagers all grow up to be lame?

The coolness gap is real.

It's because they can't afford it..hip hip hooray!

They don't want to admit that its because legal recreational pot usage is on the rise as a safer alternative to nicotine and alcohol

Pop culture’s glamorization of smoking? What year is it, 1990?

On the flip side, dismay and despair are way up!

What? Is it because teens can't afford booze, cigarettes, and drugs anymore? Maybe they need to buy less Starbucks and avocado toast so they can party more.

This is a good trend I think. I hope they carry it on well into the rest of their lives.

I don't have any friend to get high with :((

Hopefully they're just smoking weed instead of drugs

The one thing I wish europeans would mimic from the USA.

Post pandemic scamflation in action

Of course better education and all that stuff becoming super expensive makes it much less desirable.

Would like to see the data distribution by geography

Could have fooled me by the way they vote.

I've done a lot of different drugs, and I'd rank the addictiveness of social media between flakka and crack. (I have not done heroine or fenta)

So yeah, good job USA. /s

was weed included in those statistics? because Im pretty sure weed use is up among teens

Oy.

Yes, these self-reporting polls have been used for decade as one measurement device. They were fine when it was self-evident what "smoking", "drinking", and "drugs" meant.

Now the issues are far more complex and nuanced, and we now live in a world where the pharmacological knowledge of today's random 14yo outshines what I would have learned in 2nd year university in the 90s.

Kids drink cough syrup recreationally because "that's not drugs". We still live in world of denial where benzos are "drugs" but alcohol isn't because idk I guess the active molecules are suspended in liquid?

Young people have been propagandized and lied to, to the point many don't even know if they're "smoking" or not.

Youths these days suck, where is this world going

Just better at hiding it. From my employees I hear all sorts of harder drugs going around than when I was in the same school

Does this include vaping? I hope that's also declining as well

They’re vaping plenty

I don't understand these kids nowadays...

They all vape instead.