Daily marijuana use has outpaced daily drinking in the United States, according to a study published Wednesday.
The study compared four eras of marijuana policy in the U.S. and found that marijuana use had climbed since 2008, according to the Associated Press.
The study, published in Addiction, compared the rates of marijuana use in 1979, 1992, 2008, and 2022 to daily drinking and researched how marijuana policy may have affected this outcome. The different eras were selected based on available data and because they represented shifts in marijuana policy. For example, 1979 represents the “end of [the] relatively liberal policies of the 1970s.”
Daily marijuana use reached its “nadir” in 1992, which the study notes laid at the end of the conservative Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush presidencies and represented a shift after 1992 toward more liberal policies related to marijuana with the election of President Bill Clinton.
The report suggested marijuana use has been adopted in a similar vein to tobacco use.
“A good 40% of current cannabis users are using it daily or near daily, a pattern that is more associated with tobacco use than typical alcohol use,” Jonathan Caulkins, a cannabis policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the study, told the outlet.
The report noted that while there are still more drinkers in the U.S., those who use marijuana do so far more than those who drink. From 1992 to 2022, there was a 15-fold increase in those who reported using marijuana daily. In 1992, daily drinkers outnumbered daily marijuana users 10 to 1, with 8.9 million people drinking daily versus 0.9 million daily marijuana users. In 2022, the number of daily drinkers versus marijuana users was 14.7 million to 17.7 million.
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Marijuana policy has relaxed at the state level since the earlier eras represented in the study. Since 2012, 24 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana, and a majority of the public live in a state where marijuana has been legalized, at 54%. While many states have legalized the drug, marijuana is still illegal at the federal level.
The study used data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.