US teen drug, alcohol and tobacco use continues to decline

Gaming and social media is the new addiction.

Considering the article specifies that drugs, alcohol, and tobacco are “social” activities, I think this makes sense. It’s not good that kids are shifting to solitary activities
- Gaming is very much a social activity.
  Try finding a triple A game released in the last 10 years that hasnt been heavily designed around multiplayer.
  It hasnt been until indie games have really caught on, perhaps as a result of the shift towards open world multiplayer gaming that now dominates, that there is still a market for those types of games.
  I know multiple married people that used gaming to connect with each other when they had to be apart.
  I was actually on one of those married couples first date because they played league of legends, and that was how I even knew them.
I'm 41, and my cousin has young teens. I asked "Do kids today even play video games?"
And she said "Not in the way you would think. It's not about playstation or nintendo. It's about cell phones and tablets."
Which made me sad. App gaming is laaaaaame.
- I hope that’s just your experience - being relegated to mobile games would be sad. I mean I’m addicted too but I recognize they’re just a time and attention waster.
  My older teens are pretty avid gamers as are their friends. One of them started a gaming club at his school! They’re such great kids they sometimes let their Mom or me join a party, and they don’t laugh too hard
- So bad. It can't be very good for developing brains either... Video games can be great for developing things like motor functioning and abstract reasoning, and so much of that is lost with the mindlessness of mobile gaming.
- App gaming is laaaaaame.
  desktops/laptops, ps5, and Xbox all use apps.
This. There is no decline at all, I assume. Just an extreme switch to something even more powerful.
Yeah as much as this is good news, I think it’s just a sign of changes that have come in the digital age. Young people go out less in general, because their social life is all online. This is probably safer for them at the end of the day - less driving and less access to substances through friends. But still… the fact that young people are glued to their screens all the time is disturbing. Their lives may be longer, but what is the point of living when all you do is sit inside and consume social media?

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.

Teenagers going out to party - bad
Teenagers sitting at home - also bad.
What the hell are kids supposed to do? Just not exist from the period where we stop finding them cute till adulthood?
- Not born.
- You can go out to party without doing heroin.
- Going out to party isn't bad. Sitting at home using drugs and alcohol compulsively because you are addicted is bad. It's a fine line to walk but lots of people do it. I did every drug under the sun as a youth and turned out fine, and this applies to pretty much my entire university cohort. Not a single one of them ended up as a junkie.
  Should we encourage kids to drink and do drugs? I don't know tbh. That experience was genuinely positive for me because it gets me out there in the world, made me friends and memories and taught me lessons about moderation. From my point of view the people who ended up getting the shit end of the stick were the handful of people I know who got addicted to WoW and online gambling, not the one who did drugs on occasion. But apparently those things are becoming common and culturally acceptable while partying isn't. Take that as you will.
- I got my vasectomy, did you?
- Sports, Music, Hobbies like board games, Outdoor activities like camping and hiking.
  There is plenty of fulfilling things to do together that dont involve alcohol or other drugs or "partying" in the sense of loud music, bad hookups and regrettable videos the next day.
Why assume people can't socialize in person without the use of drugs?
Why do you single out alcohol as "should be used in moderation"? It's literally a hard drug and way worse than cigarettes.
- Does "hard drug" have an agreed upon definition?
  I'm pretty sure cigarettes are worse. Much more addictive, harmful to the user and nearby people, and the cigarette butts I think are an environmental hazard.
  Alcohol use is as old as human civilization. I don't think light usage is that hazardous.

Can't afford it probably 🤷‍♂️

Most studies found that raising cigarette prices through increased taxes is a highly effective measure for reducing smoking among youth, young adults, and persons of low socioeconomic status. However, there is a striking lack of evidence about the impact of increasing cigarette prices on smoking behavior in heavy/long-term smokers, persons with a dual diagnosis and Aboriginals. nih
- Aboriginals?
According to my school people would just hand them out on the streets for you.
- Man. Your citys drug dealers are so nice! And also so stupid. That's not a sustainable business model at all.
  I know old people who go to the mall, do a lap around the food court, get a free sample on a toothpick of all the fast food in the food court, and call it lunch. They never actually buy any.
- When I was your age, people would give away expensive drugs for free on Halloween!

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.

You also have to give credit to youngins these days that they are smart enough to spend money by going to gym and choosing to live a healthier lifestyle instead. This is according to many news report.
And also, I think the rise of social media is to be credited as well because instead of going out to socialise, the younger generation are socialising digitally. Of course social media has its drawbacks, which is getting highlighted more in recent years for understandable reasons, but it also has an upside and really it offers many alternatives that traditions couldn't. I know us older folks begrudge social media, but hey, it's here to stay. For better or worse.
- It's probably my choice of gym but I see almost no young people in it. It's mostly 30-somethings that figured out that eating garbage all the time and staying thin stops at 30. Yes, that includes me.

“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

So abstinence does work! /s
Well, they have friends, but after spending about a year not seeing them in person, they are used to just meeting them online. At least anecdotally that's what I'm seeing with the kids of my group, that going out is a hassle and online is good enough. When they do, it's maybe a total of three or four people hanging out, no big parties to speak of.
On a related note, the schools I know of pretty much stopped having dances other than the prom. In fact, from what I hear, the ability for students to socialize broadly has been pretty much tanked since the pandemic (stricter schedules, no more lockers, and various other measures instituted to avoid congregating students after pandemic and those policies seem to have stuck, presumably because it makes the students a bit easier to manage. It's been a cause for concern for me about their social development, as while I never was big on those events, I at least remember a lot more downtime on school grounds that our kids don't seem to get.
Not just them, frankly we haven't really been seeing folks in person nearly as much since the pandemic. There are certain special occasions, but we almost never have a "random" visit for no particular reason anymore.

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.

People are also more poor in general.
Wages have been stagnating for over 50 years.
Independence requires financial independence.
It's not possible to meaningfully participate in society without disposable income.
This leads to the avg person having less power and influence than almost any of their ancestors.
Unfortunately nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
- I can barely afford to drink in my basement!
- Video games are fundamentally experiences of agency, of being in some kind of environment that is dynamic, spontaneous and in conversation with the player.
  Modern life on the other hand is fundamentally the experience of having no agency and being in a car choked landscape where nothing is dynamic, spontaneous or in conversation with you (especially as pedestrian when not driving).
  I am going to spend time where I have agency, where the landscape was designed in joyous anticipation of someone like me existing in it, the real life human spaces around me have been exhaustively rectified to the brutality and logic of latestage capitalism and thus these "real" landscapes around me are dead.
  Society seems to every day increasingly hate and punish people who want to explore, play and create. Why the fuck would I want to spend time in real life spaces when they were designed out of a specific hatred for the kind of thing that makes me feel happy, alive and welcome?
  Playing video games is something I do because I am poor AND because I gravitate towards landscapes and communities that were designed by people who don't hate my brain and the way I think and live.
- I mean if you didn't had disposable income, drugs were the last of your worries in that scenario
This is a big part of it for sure. I have a 21 year old nephew who refuses to get his license. He just says yeah I've got lots of friends that drive me where I need to go. It's not always going to be like that, kid.
I got my learner's permit the day I turned 15 and my license the day I turned 16. Couldn't wait to get away from my family.

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.

I mean honestly you might be on to something here, quitting smoking is hard as fuck, you might expect the signal of desperation induced quitting in smoking to reliably cut through the noise of other factors given how difficult it is for other factors to push people to quit.
brutal on so many levels if true tho...

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

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?

Interesting idea but they are comparing different year surveys with the same age children.
Do you think that kids are more prone to lying now, than earlier years?
- I'd wager that teenagers these day are much more aware of data collection and more protective of personal information then they were 10-20 years ago. I could be giving them too much credit, though.
- Possibly? Could correspond with increased digital surveillance. Most people understand that nothing is private anymore.

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

The coolness gap is real.

Seriously, my teenage niece is a complete square, but still looks up to me as her cool uncle, so I encourage her straight laced nerdiness.
Hopefully she doesn't burn out in her 20s and make a series of painful but cool mistakes like I did.
- This is why it's important for teenagers to make their coolest mistakes early on in life while there are fewer consequences.

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

Ah. The system works.

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

Who's "they"? This is a university study, not one sponsored by Budweiser/Marlboro.
Also, they didn't bother separating based on legality, but did research marijuana use and no, it's not on the rise:
The results show that a whopping 66% of 12th graders reported no use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. This is the highest abstinence rate recorded since the survey began tracking it in 2017.
Also surprising is that marijuana usage among teens is declining – despite a notable upward trend for adults across the US.
- "They" are the 12th graders interviewed by the university study

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

Trade-offs
- If only there were dismay and despair treatments you could administer yourself...

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.

Is it because teens can’t afford booze, cigarettes, and drugs anymore?
Per the article:
The decrease in drug usage during the pandemic was somewhat of a surprise to experts. With the lockdowns causing depression rates to rise dramatically, an increase in drugs and drinking wouldn’t have been too much of a shock. But as the biggest factor in drug use for young people is peer pressure, the lockdowns had the opposite effect.
“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.”
...
The continuing decline of teen drug, alcohol and tobacco usage is a positive sign that these industries no longer have the power they once did over the country’s youth. But a disturbing trend in pop culture shows that cigarettes could be sneakily making a comeback.
“I too see more and more smoking in the media and on these different shows I watch with my teenage daughter,” said Miech. “But fortunately, so far, it hasn’t actually translated into higher levels of cigarette smoking among adolescence.”
Somebody forget to hand them their bootstraps to pull up.
- As soon as I get mine in the mail, I will help them look for theirs.

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

I might just be lucky, but I've had great success in getting in random friend groups while playing games where you can build things and explore.
Valheim, space engineers, minecraft, terraria. Stuff like that.
I think maybe it has to do with people logging into the dedicated server and seeing the stuff you build and they think of you. Plus lots of those servers will have a discord and that's basically getting into a ton of people's DMs. You can post in the discord music you like, funny dumb pictures and memes. Stuff that really shows what you're interested in. This way people can see if they're into the same stuff as you. Then you can branch out to other games or even meet ups IRL.
Never stopped me!

Hopefully they're just smoking weed instead of drugs

Their tick talking and vaping

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

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

Post pandemic scamflation in action

Would like to see the data distribution by geography

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

I just saw a documentary of some sort talking about how movies and tv shows these days are specifically designed to be watchable with minimal viewer engagement because everyone is on their phone and the tv is a second screen. At least, I think that's what they were saying, I was barely paying attention because I was on my phone doom scrolling. I've done every drug in the book plus a bunch that I'd be seriously impressed if you had ever heard of them, and none of them touch the addictiveness of my stupid phone.
- Yeah it's pretty crazy how addictive it is.
  Sad thing is not many people listen to drug users. Even though drug users are... the ones that have actual experience in addictiveness.

Could have fooled me by the way they vote.

Those damned 8th graders, throwing our elections!

Youths these days suck, where is this world going

No, it doesn’t seem like the survey covered that
Calm down Socrates

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

Huh? It's a survey
Sure, they could be lying, but why would they?
And your employee anecdotal stories mean zilch
- I love when people reply to data with anecdotes
- I lied on those "anonymous" drug use surveys in highschool even when they were hand written because I was worried they would match the way I full in bubbles with a test I had my name on or something. (Maybe I was a little nuts back then...) I'm sure those surveys are now done via an email link on your own devices or some shit. Why wouldn't they lie?
Are you implying that kids today are more likely to lie on anonymous surveys than past generations? That is a mind-boggling assertion. What makes you think that?
- The pandemic did erode trust in institutions, so there's that, but also in general I would be very surprised to learn that today's youth is less or the same amount suspicious as youths in the past. Are those surveys actually anonymous? No way for the youth to know.
- because if the survey was done on school computers the students likely know/assume the computer has administrative spyware on it. I know this because when I took a similar survey to this at my school the known spyware program was still running while we took the "anonymous" survey.
  No one in their right mind should trust anonymous surveys taken on computers that a known surveillance agency controls.
- Not that person, but if the survey is taken online, or on any digital format, I would 100% be more likely to lie.

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.

They’re vaping plenty

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

Among 12th graders, 66% reported no recent use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, while 80% of 10th graders and 90% of 8th graders avoided these substances entirely
I would say yes.
- I've been told vaping and e-cigs are different, idk if e-cigs in this post include vapes or not tho

I don't understand these kids nowadays...

They all vape instead.

Among 12th graders, 66% reported no recent use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, while 80% of 10th graders and 90% of 8th graders avoided these substances entirely
Turns out, the people running this thought of that possibility.