Young people in the United States used marijuana and some hallucinogens at record levels last year, according to a new report funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to a new report funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Nearly 43 percent of respondents said they had used marijuana in the past 12 months, up from nearly 34 percent in 2016, and from 29 percent in 2011, according to the University of Michigan study, which polled nearly 5,000 people. A guy and a girl between 19 and 30 years old.
More than 28 percent of young adults said they had used marijuana in the past month, and more than one in ten had consumed it on an almost daily basis, according to the report.
The report says that while the rates weren’t a huge jump from 2020, they were “the highest levels ever recorded since the indicators were first available in 1988.”
Recreational marijuana is legal in Washington, DC, and 19 states, four of which were legalized last year only.
The use of hallucinogens has also reached record levels, with more than six percent of young people saying they have used them in the past 12 months.
Hallucinogens, sometimes called psychedelics, are illegal in the United States, although some cities have legalized “magic mushrooms,” which contain psilocybin, a hallucinogenic chemical compound.
MDMA, sometimes called Ecstasy or Molly, was the most frequently used drug among young adults, with 2.6 percent of those surveyed saying they had used it last year.
The report indicated that “alcohol remains the most frequently used substance among adults in the study,” with a third of young people expressing their excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages, by five or more drinks in a row, which represents a regression to pre-epidemic levels.
Levels of “high intensity” drinking, defined by the report as containing 10 or more drinks in a row, rose to 13 percent in 2021, up from 11 percent in 2011.
But in the same time frame, the number of young people who said they drank alcohol fell from about 84 percent in 2011, to just under 82 percent in 2021.
“These data provide a window into the consumption of these substances and the patterns of use preferred by young people,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health, in a statement.
“We need to know more about how young people use drugs such as marijuana, their hallucinogens, and the health effects of their consumption,” she added.