NEW YORK—Teen drug use hasn’t rebounded from its drop during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the results from a large annual national survey released Tuesday. About two-thirds of 12th graders this year said they hadn’t used alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, or e-cigarettes in the previous 30 days. That’s the largest proportion abstaining since the annual survey started measuring abstinence in 2017.
Among 10th graders, 80 percent said they hadn’t used any of those substances recently, another record. Among 8th graders, 90 percent didn’t use any of them, the same as was reported in the previous survey. The only significant increase occurred in nicotine pouches.
About 6 percent of 12th graders saying they’d used them in the previous year, up from about 3 percent in 2023. Whether that has the makings of a new public health problem is unclear. The University of Michigan’s Richard Miech, who leads the survey, said: “It’s hard to know if we’re seeing the start of something, or not.
” The federally funded Monitoring the Future survey has been operating since 1975. This year’s findings are based on responses from about 24,000 students in grades 8, 10, and 12 in schools across the country. The survey is “one of the best, if not the best” source of national data for substance use by teens, said Noah Kreski, a Columbia University researcher who has studied teen drug use.
Early in the pandemic, students across the country were told not to .