‘Higher’ Education? Daily Marijuana Use Among College Students Highest Since 1980

Regular use of marijuana is now more common among U.S. college students than cigarette use, a new study says.

Almost 6% of college students reported using pot daily or near-daily in 2014, up from 3.5% in 2007 but less than the 7.2% recorded in 1980, the University of Michigan’s monitoring the future study found.

Principal investigator of the study, Lloyd Johnston, described how it was clear to see the increase emerge over the past seven to eight years and said: “This largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high school seniors”.

The percentage of university students using any illicit drug also rose to 41 per cent in 2014, compared with 34 per cent in 2006 – an increase driven mostly by the uptick in marijuana use, the study said.

Monitoring the Future, used by federal health officials to track data on youth substance abuse, surveyed between 1000 and 1500 full-time college students for the study, which has been conducted annually since 1980. Use in the prior 12 months rose from 30% in 2006 to 34% in 2014.

The survey showed that 63 percent of college students in 2014 said that they have had an alcoholic beverage at least once in the prior 30 days, down considerably from 82 percent in 1981.

However, the declines in cigarette smoking have been accompanied by some increases in the use of other forms of tobacco or nicotine. In comparison, only 5% of the participants categorized themselves as heavy smokers, which is a vast improvement over statistics in 1999, that had 19% of students claim to smoking cigarettes every day.

One highlight of the study is that half of the college students said they had not used any illegal drugs in the past year. For example, while 55 percent of kids ages 19-to-22-year-old saw regular marijuana use as risky in 2006, only 35 percent saw it as unsafe by 2014.

Less frequent pot smoking was also on the rise, although not as sharply. “Perhaps the most important is that five out of every 10 college students have not used any illicit drug in the past year, and more than three quarters have not used any in the prior month”, he added. Both of these measures leveled in 2014, according to the study. Results showed that only 5% of respondents had 15 or more drinks in a row at least once since last two weeks.

“It seems likely that this increase in amphetamine use on the college campus resulted from more students using these drugs to try to improve their studies and test performance,” Johnston stated in the press release.

One of the study’s surprises came from a surge in the number of students using amphetamines without a prescription, which grew from 5.7 percent in 2007 to 10.1 percent in 2014.