There were significant increases in the percentage of adolescents who had vaped marijuana in the last 12 months, with 21% of 12th-graders having done so, an increase of nearly 8 percentage points since last year, according to the Monitoring the Future annual report released on Wednesday.
The study, from the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), also showed that there were significant increases in use by all secondary students, resulting in at least one million additional marijuana vapers this year compared to 2018.
A national public health crisis that began this summer has had marijuana and nicotine vaping products at the center, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 52 deaths and 2,409 others hospitalized, according to The Hill.
NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow said the growing popularity of vaping “threatens to undo years of progress protecting the health of adolescents in the U.S.”
On the positive side, there has been a steady decrease in the percentage of seniors who said they had drunk alcohol in the past year, falling to 52% , down from 73.2% at the turn of the century, according to CNN.
The use of cigarettes has also fallen dramatically, with only 5.7% of seniors saying they had smoked in the past month compared with 13.6% who said they had done so in the survey from five years ago.
American Public Health Association executive director Dr. Georges Benjamin told CNN it is very concerning that “the youth often don't know what they are vaping and many believe it is safe. In some ways youth are simply switching from one set of addictive substance to another which is not safer.”
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