The number of people who use cannabis on a daily basis now exceeds the number of daily alcohol drinkers in the US, new research reveals. Overall, more people continue to consume booze than weed across the country, yet the proportion of high-frequency stoners has skyrocketed, overtaking regular alcohol use for the first time.
Study author Jonathan P. Caulkins from Carnegie Mellon University looked at data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse as well as the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in order to determine how usage rates changed between 1979 and 2022. This period saw a number of major shifts in US drug policy, and results indicate that fluctuations in cannabis consumption closely mirror these legal and political developments.
Caulkins focused on four milestone years that represented key junctures in the country’s official relationship with cannabis. The first of these was 1979, which is the earliest year for which data is available and marked the end of a period of liberalization during which 11 states decriminalized or reduced penalties for cannabis use.
The next year under consideration was 1992, the end point of the highly punitive stance on cannabis adopted by both the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Next, Caulkins looked at data from 2008, which saw the beginning of a new era of federal non-interference with state policy and facilitated the legalization of cannabis in Washington and Colorado in 2012.
Finally, the researcher looked at 2022, which is the most recent year for which data exists and is representative of the ongoing wave of state-level legalization and decriminalization across the US. Overall, Caulkins examined 27 surveys from these four years, including a total of 1.6 million respondents.
Results indicate that reported cannabis use plunged to an all-time low in 1992 before rebounding as the political landscape became increasingly pot-friendly.
In the early 90s, daily or near-daily drinkers outnumbered daily cannabis users by 8.9 million to 0.9 million. Three decades later, however, the number of regular pot users had increased 15-fold to 17.7 million, while daily drinkers numbered just 14.7 million.
Looking closer at the data from 2022, the author found that the US still contains many more boozers than stoners, but while the average alcohol drinker partakes on just four or five days per month, those who use cannabis do so on 15 to 16 days each month.
“These trends mirror changes in policy, with declines during periods of greater restriction and growth during periods of policy liberalization,” said Caulkins in a statement. “It is striking that high-frequency cannabis use is now more commonly reported than is high-frequency drinking,” he adds.
As a caveat, it’s important to consider that the data comes from voluntary self-reports, and may therefore be heavily influenced by political dangers. For instance, many cannabis users are unlikely to have admitted to using the drug back in 1992, when penalties for doing so were extremely harsh.
It’s therefore unclear if these numbers represent an actual increase in use or simply reflect a diminishing reluctance to openly report such behavior as the legal risks for doing so disappear.
“Willingness to self-report may have increased as cannabis became normalized, so changes in actual use may be less pronounced than changes in reported use,” writes Caulkins.
“Nonetheless, the enormous changes in rates of self-reported cannabis use, particularly of [daily or near-daily] use, suggest that changes in actual use have been considerable,” he concludes.
The study is published in the journal Addiction.
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