Long-Term Trends In American Drug Use; Why Is The Good News Going Unreported?

but Teh Weeed...

I guess the secret is out: marijuana remains popular with Americans, evidently more so than ever. This finding arrives at the same time that an unprecedented number of Americans are dying from drug overdoses, particularly from the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl (40 times stronger than heroin by weight), or from drug combinations that include fentanyl (it’s increasingly showing up combined with the most powerful illicitly supplied stimulants methamphetamine and cocaine, sometimes sold to unwitting buyers, or unwitting users who share the substance.)

Is there a causal link between that correlation? No. Most of the overdose casualties are confirmed opioid addicts; according to my sources, that epidemic appears to have peaked around 10 years ago.

A note about the source that I’m using to supply the data cited below in this post: all tables and figures are taken from the Monitoring The Future survey reports done by the University of Michigan. These reports represent the first detailed surveys of the substance habits of Americans nationwide; they date back to 1975. (I was a participant in the 1977 survey; it was anonymous, and the individual participants chose their own alphanumeric code for the survey report.)The original emphasis of the surveys was on young people- college students, in particular- but they’ve since expanded their scope to include a much broader cross-section of Americans. The MTF surveys provide the clearest, most comprehensive, most detailed metrical data that I’ve found on this topic. (MTF surveys cover many other topics, for what it’s worth.) The surveys have been funded by the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) since their inception. I presume that the surveys provide much of the data used for the SAMHSA NSDUH annual reports, if not all of it; however, the SAMSHA tables I’ve found don’t cover any year prior to 1992, and many of them don’t provide numbers for years earlier than 2000. The MTF data is invaluable for providing the additional time context required to make sense of trends in American substance use, legal and illegal.

The methodology of the U. Michigan Monitoring The Future reports is also much more readable and more easily accessed than that found for the NSDUH reports put out by SAMHSA. To quote a brief summary outline from 2007:

Every year since 1975, University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston’s team has conducted the Monitoring the Future study of 50,000 young Americans. In this first part of a multi-part interview, Johnston describes how the survey that has interviewed more than 1 million people all began.

Unfortunately, the page link for that quote leads to audio interview and transcript that are no longer accessible. But that’s the gist of how much data is collected. More detail on data collection and the weighting used for some of the figures in their tables and bar graphs is provided in the text portions of the reports.

Now, let’s review some of the tables from the 2021 MTF reports. (Reference links for the MTF reports that connect to the .pdf documents that have supplied the source for all figures of the tables and figures shown are provided at the bottom of the page.)

The term “narcotics” in the tables below is used with strict accuracy, as a synonym for opioids.

The figures are similar for almost every substance- whether legal or illegal- other than marijuana, and a noteworthy recent resurgence in the use of “hallucinogens” (a miscellaneous category ranging from LSD to ketamine, along with the continuing parade of “research chemicals” that have achieved popularity and/or notoriety in the Internet/Dark Net era.) The levels of hallucinogen use are still far below those of the peak years of the 20th century, however. And overall, the “gateway drug” effect alleged for marijuana seems to be nonexistent. Consider the summed chart below, beginning with the year 1988: the “any use in the previous 12 months” figure for all “illicit substances other than marijuana” of any kind combined remains roughly stable, with no evidence of a sustained increase in those numbers over the previous 15 years:

The most relevant metrics, of course, relate to the “hard drugs” that lead to the most dysfunction, addiction, and public health impacts.

In that regard, have a look at the course of the so-called “methamphetamine epidemic”; as with the opioids, the total number of Americans reporting use- both high school age and older- has dropped precipitously in recent years:

A resurgence in cocaine use has also been reported in the news media, primarily relying on statistics on a marked increase in cocaine overdose deaths to support the claim. But the U. Michigan MTF survey data published in 2022 does not bear out that conclusion:

Given the trends indicated by the data: is the United States of America really still under siege by an surging epidemic of hard drugs use? It’s undeniable that the number of users of opioids had at one time markedly increased: beginning in the mid-1990s, with the end of the peak era around 2010-2012. But the drop in newer initiates to opioid use has been dramatic- which indicates that most of the overdose casualties of the most recent years were people in the population of users who had already acquired their addiction some years before they succumbed to the lethality of the illicit opioid market, where bootleg fentanyl has recently become the mainstay. The increasing supply of fentanyl has also indisputably played a role in the rising number of cocaine and methamphetamine overdoses in recent years. (The CDC does not as a rule make note of whether or not a given drug was ingested alone, or in combination with other substances; most often it simply makes note of the presence of a given substance in the overdose victim. Attributing the cause to a specific substance in cases of combined drug overdose is often difficult or impossible. Substances often interact in ways that result in the combined lethality being more than the sum of the separate components, particularly in the case of CNS depressants- including alcohol.)

There’s no question that we still face major challenges in lowering the numbers of Americans who are addicted to the most harmful drugs. But new recruitment appears to have fallen off dramatically, judging by the charts shown above. Those figures indicate that the rising tide of new opioid and meth addiction began to abate ten years ago, and that decline of new users has been neither gradual or intermittent.

Those trends bode well for the future. They indicate success- at least as far as the showing the ability of Americans, particularly young people, to voluntarily refrain from using the most harmful substances available on the illicit market. It’s good news. Why is it so seldom reported in the American news media?

URL links for the U. Michigan Monitoring The Future reports that I’ve excerpted:

MTF Annual Report on Adult Drug Use, 1976-2021

https://monitoringthefuture.org/results/publications/monographs/panel-study-annual-report-adults-1976-2021/

MTF Tables And Figures for High School Students (complete)

https://monitoringthefuture.org/results/data-products/tables-and-figures/

Just to make note of the array of MTF survey statistics collected for specific substances: