Pot Smoking Reaches 35-Year High on U.S. College Campuses: Study

More relaxed attitudes about the dangers of marijuana may be responsible for an increase in pot smoking among college students, according to a new University of Michigan study. (Photo by Chuck Grimmett/Flickr)

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The nation’s college students are still lighting up.

But they’re toking on marijuana more often than they’re smoking regular tobacco cigarettes, according to the results of a University of Michigan study announced Tuesday.

For the first time, daily marijuana usage eclipsed cigarette smoking among students, said investigators with the annual “Monitoring the Future” study.

The percentage of college students who reported daily or near-daily use of marijuana in 2014 – 5.9 percent – was the highest rates since 1980. At the same time, 5 percent identified themselves heavy cigarette smokers, a steep decline from the 19 percent who said they were heavy smokers in 1999.

In 2007, just 3.5 percent of college students identified themselves as near-daily pot smokers.

“It’s clear that for the past seven or eight years there has been an increase in marijuana use among the nation’s college students,” Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator of the study, said in a statement. “And this largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high school seniors.”

Casual cannabis use – smoking once or more in the last 30 days – also is increasing among college students. In 2006, 17 percent of college students said they sometimes smoked marijuana, compared with 21 percent 2014.

The researchers attributed much of the increase to more relaxed attitudes about the dangers of marijuana among adolescents and young adults. In 2006, 55 percent of all 19- to 22-year-old high school graduates saw regular marijuana use as dangerous. In 2014, only 21 percent felt similarly.

Cocaine Use On Rise

Marijuana isn’t the only illicit drug college students are using, according to the study.

A seven-year increase in all illicit drugs (from 34 percent in 2006 to 41 percent in 2013 before falling off some to 39 percent in 2014) was due primarily to marijuana, the researchers said, but the use of ecstasy and non-prescribed amphetamines also increased.

Increased cocaine use was of particular concern to the researchers. In 2013, 2.7 percent of students said they had used the drug in the past year. A year later, 4.4 percent said they had used in the past year.

“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 said.

“We are being cautious in interpreting this one-year increase, which we do not see among high school students; but we do see some increase in cocaine use in other young adult age bands, so there may in fact be an increase in cocaine use beginning to occur,” he said.

Half of College Students Don’t Use Drugs At All

The news wasn’t all bad for parents sending their children off to college. Half of college students said they hadn’t used any illicit drug in the past year, and three-fourths of them had not used drugs in the prior month.

There’s also no evidence of a shift over from narcotic drugs to use of heroin, which has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Use of heroin has been very low among college students over the past five years or so – lower than it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the investigators noted.

Use of all non-medical narcotics, which have been tied to increasing overdose deaths, is declining among college students, falling from 8.8 percent who reported use of such substances in the past to 4.8 percent in 2014.

This is a particularly welcome improvement from a public health point of view, the investigators noted.

Use of LSD, Club Drugs Also Declines

LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, once a staple in students’ party pantries, remains at low levels among college students, with past-year usage rates of 2.2 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. Club drugs like Ketamine, GHB and Rohypnol also are used at low levels. And bath salts – synthetic stimulants – never caught on among college students, who reported negligible use, according to the study.

Heavy binge drinking – five or more drinks in a row on at least one occasion in the prior two weeks – also is declining. Between 1980 and 2014, binge drinking declined 9 percentage points from 44 percent to 35 percent.

Still, students are engaging in dangerous “extreme” binge drinking – 10 to 15 drinks per sitting in the prior two weeks – at levels that concern the investigators.

“Despite the modest improvements in drinking alcohol at college, there are still a sizable number of students who consume alcohol at particularly dangerous levels,” Johnston said.

The investigators also noted that though regular and casual cigarette smoking are declining, some students have begun substituting other forms of tobacco and nicotine, including hookah, regular and flavored small cigars, and large cigars.

Monitoring the Future is an annual survey that has been reporting on U.S. college students’ substance use of all kinds for 35 years. The study began in 1980 and is conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of Health.