There are a lot of reasons for optimism after reading the latest edition of Monitoring the Future’s National Survey Results on Drug Use. For one thing, some gains in the reduction of teen drug use seem to have persisted past the most severe years of the pandemic. The study’s authors wrote that for eighth and 10th graders, those who responded that they had had “no use of alcohol, cannabis, or nicotine by vaping or by cigarettes” was on the rise; the report used the phrase “historic high levels,” in fact.
What’s more concerning are small but noticeable increases in teen heroin and cocaine use. Monitoring the Future found increases in heroin use in the three grades it monitors: eighth, 10th and 12th. The largest increase, from 0.2% to 0.9%, came in the last of those. Cocaine use also increased in both eighth graders and 12th graders, with the latter increasing from from 0.9% to 1.4%. The study’s authors did note that overall use of both drugs remained low overall, with the “prevalence less than 2% in all grades.”
While not as severe as cocaine or heroin, nicotine patch use also seems to be on the rise among teens in the U.S. The report’s authors found that “lifetime use increased in all grades,” with the majority of use coming in the 12th grade. Between 2024 and 2024, the percentage of 12th graders surveyed who had used nicotine patches increased from seven percent to 10%.
Scammers Are Faking Tom Hanks’s Image to Sell “Miracle Cures and Wonder Drugs”
This isn’t the first time scammers have faked Hanks’s likenessHaving data collected like this over decades is invaluable for obtaining a sense of how certain behaviors — drug consumption and abstention, in this case — shift over time. And at this time next year, we should have a better sense if these slight upticks in cocaine and heroin use were a sign of something alarming, or just a statistical anomaly.
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