The Teen Weed Boom Never Came

Filed Under: Policy Receipts

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For years, opponents of adult-use cannabis legalization warned that teenagers would be the ones who paid for it. Legal marijuana would become normal, dispensaries would put cannabis into everyday view, and more kids would start using it.

That argument helped shape legalization fights across the country because it was easy to understand and frightening enough to stick. If legal access for adults encouraged more adolescent use, the effect should eventually appear in the national numbers.

More than a decade after Colorado and Washington became the first states to approve adult-use cannabis, it still has not.

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System tracks marijuana use among U.S. high school students. The latest federal data show 12.9 percent reported using marijuana during the previous 30 days in 2025, down from 17 percent in 2023 and 23.1 percent in 2011, the year before Colorado and Washington approved adult-use legalization. Lifetime use followed the same path, falling from 39.9 percent in 2011 to 25.5 percent in 2025.

Those numbers do not prove legalization caused teenagers to use less marijuana. They do give us a way to judge one of the most persistent predictions made during the legalization era: that legal adult markets would be followed by a broad increase in adolescent use.

Kevin Sabet, cofounder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, made the concern explicit in 2014 as Colorado’s recreational market was getting underway. He argued that safeguards designed to keep cannabis away from minors would eventually fail because commercial marijuana companies depended on heavy consumers.

“They have to target young people as part of a successful business model.”

Sabet was explaining why he believed commercialization itself would eventually put young people at greater risk. The quote appeared in a Christian Science Monitor report.

By 2020, SAM was arguing that the effect was already visible.

“Youth use is up.”

The organization said marijuana use among young people was increasing in legal states and pointed to vaping and near-daily use as evidence that commercialization was harming adolescents. SAM laid out that argument in its 2020 report on legalization.

That turns the argument into a measurable prediction.

If legalization and commercialization were producing a broad increase in adolescent marijuana use, years of expanding adult access should eventually push national prevalence higher. Instead, the largest federal surveys are showing fewer teenagers reporting marijuana use.

The 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, provides an independent look at adolescents ages 12 through 17. SAMHSA reported that past-month marijuana use in that group fell from 6.1 percent in 2021 to 5.0 percent in 2025. Past-year use declined from 10.9 percent to 8.7 percent over the same four years.

Adults moved the other way. Among people 26 and older, past-month marijuana use increased from 12.3 percent in 2021 to 14.9 percent in 2025, while past-year use rose from 17.3 percent to 20.6 percent.

The contrast cuts into the old normalization argument. Cannabis use became more common among adults without producing the corresponding increase among adolescents that critics said would follow.

Those numbers cannot tell us what caused the decline. The pandemic disrupted schools and social life, cigarette and alcohol use have fallen, prevention efforts may have mattered, and teenagers now spend their time differently than they did fifteen years ago.

What they can show is that greater adult acceptance did not automatically pull youth prevalence upward with it.

Monitoring the Future provides a third national check. The federally supported University of Michigan study surveys students in the 8th, 10th, and 12th grades using a national school sample. In 2025, past-year marijuana use was 8 percent among 8th graders, 16 percent among 10th graders, and 26 percent among 12th graders. For 10th and 12th graders, those were the lowest annual marijuana-use levels recorded in roughly three decades. Eighth-grade use remained around 8 percent after falling from 11 percent in 2020. The figures appear in the Monitoring the Future annual report.

The value of having three national surveys is that they do not measure exactly the same group in exactly the same way. YRBS surveys high school students through schools. NSDUH reaches adolescents ages 12 through 17 through a household survey, while Monitoring the Future samples 8th, 10th, and 12th graders. Despite those differences, neither is showing the nationwide teen marijuana boom once predicted.

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Research focused specifically on legalization is more complicated.

A 2017 JAMA Pediatrics study found marijuana use increased among 8th and 10th graders in Washington after legalization when compared with states that had not legalized. It found no comparable increase among Washington 12th graders or among the three grades studied in Colorado.

Later studies have reached different conclusions depending on the state, age group, period, and measure being studied. Some research has found no increase in overall adolescent prevalence following recreational legalization. Other studies have identified changes in frequency among teenagers who were already using cannabis.

A decline in the percentage of teenagers using marijuana does not mean every youth cannabis measure improved.

SAMHSA estimated that 4.4 percent of adolescents ages 12 through 17 met criteria for marijuana use disorder in 2025. The agency did not classify the change from 2021 as a significant decline.

Vaping also occupies a much larger place in youth cannabis use than it did during the early legalization debates. Among adolescents who had used marijuana during the previous month in the 2025 NSDUH, 69.8 percent reported vaping marijuana.

Those are separate public health questions. So are potency, frequent use, accidental ingestion, impaired driving, and age of initiation. The CDC continues to warn that cannabis use during adolescence can affect the developing brain and that frequent use can increase the risk of cannabis use disorder.

None of that makes the prevalence numbers irrelevant.

If the claim is that legalization increases heavy use among teenagers who already consume cannabis, researchers should test frequency. If the concern is high-potency products, potency data are relevant. If the prediction is that legalizing marijuana for adults will cause more teenagers to start using it, prevalence is the measure that answers the claim.

On prevalence, the national trend did not go up.

In the CDC data, current marijuana use among high school students fell from 23.1 percent in 2011 to 12.9 percent in 2025. That works out to a decline of roughly 44 percent during the period when adult-use legalization grew from an idea on two state ballots into a legal market across much of the country.

Monitoring the Future also complicates any attempt to credit legalization for the decline. Marijuana use dropped sharply after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when adolescents lost many of the school and social settings where substance use normally occurs. Researchers watched to see whether those numbers would rebound once ordinary life returned.

For cannabis, that rebound has been weak or nonexistent. Monitoring the Future reports that annual marijuana use among 10th and 12th graders continued downward through 2025, reaching lows not seen in about thirty years.

There are several possible explanations. The pandemic may have permanently changed some social habits. Broader declines in alcohol and cigarette use may be part of the same cultural shift. Online life, parental behavior, prevention programs, or changing peer groups could also be involved.

Legalization may have effects that a national prevalence number cannot show. A state can move differently from the country as a whole. Teenagers who already use cannabis may consume it more often after retail markets open, while commercial products can become more potent even if the number of adolescent users falls.

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Those complications do not change the national prevalence trend.

What the national evidence fails to show is the simple outcome that legal marijuana for adults would be followed by a nationwide boom in teenage use.

SAM itself treated youth prevalence as meaningful evidence when the organization believed the numbers favored its argument. In 2020, it declared that youth use was rising. Six more years of data now provide a much longer view.

The CDC shows current high school marijuana use far below its 2011 level. SAMHSA reports declines in both past-month and past-year use among adolescents. Monitoring the Future has annual use among 10th and 12th graders at its lowest level in about thirty years.

None of this makes teen cannabis use harmless or settles every legalization argument. Heavy use, vaping, potency, and cannabis use disorder still deserve serious attention.

But the old prediction was broader. Americans were warned that normalizing marijuana for adults would bring more teenagers into cannabis use.

Adults did start using more.

The teenagers did not.

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