The data is in, and it reveals some very encouraging news about the rate of teen drug use. To put it simply, it is on the decline.
This is a positive development. However, there is still more work to be done to protect minors from drug addiction.
A new report details findings from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which show that teenagers are not consuming drugs as often as in the past.
In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is a precipitous drop from 88 percent in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national poll of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and 10th graders, and for those three age groups when it came to cigarette smoking. In 2023, just 15 percent of seniors said that they had smoked a…
