A recent study published in the journal Addiction found that, for the first time, daily marijuana users outnumber daily alcohol drinkers in the United States.
Public health experts are closely monitoring this trend, as daily marijuana users are at increased risk for negative health effects such as episodes of severe vomiting, cardiovascular disease, dependence, and psychosis.
Marijuana use is also increasing in Minnesota, a Reformer analysis of federal data shows. The share of Minnesotans ages 12 and older who reported using marijuana in the past month increased from 7.7% in 2017 to 15.4% in 2022. Monthly alcohol consumption decreased modestly during that same period.
Daily marijuana use (defined as using the drug for 20 or more of the past 30 days) increased from 2.9% to 5.9% during the same period. But daily marijuana users in Minnesota are still vastly outnumbered by daily drinkers, who made up about 12% of the population in 2022.
Some caution is warranted with these numbers. They come from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a long-running federal project considered the gold standard survey of substance use in the United States. But the survey methodology changed in 2020 to adapt to pandemic restrictions, making it difficult to compare numbers from both sides of that year.
The pandemic also caused sharp increases in drug and alcohol use. It remains to be seen whether those numbers will remain elevated or return to pre-pandemic averages.
Still, multiple data sources show that marijuana use is increasing nationally as laws change and attitudes liberalize. Minnesota data also shows that usage rates increased before the pandemic, another indicator that the increase seen in 2022 reflects real-world behavior.
Nationally, those increases appear to be concentrated among older users, rather than younger ones. “Marijuana is becoming something of a senior drug,” as researchers Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys recently wrote. “As a group, 35- to 49-year-olds consume more than 26- to 34-year-olds, who represent a larger market share than 18- to 25-year-olds.”
This is somewhat reassuring, as researchers believe that the brains of young people are more susceptible to the negative effects of drug use than those of older people.
One area of concern for public health experts is that daily use is much more common among cannabis users than alcohol drinkers. Just over half of Minnesotans drink alcohol monthly, and about 20% of those monthly drinkers have a drink almost every day.
While Minnesota’s monthly marijuana users represent only 15% of the population, nearly 40% of them use marijuana 20 days or more in a given month.
While it attracts less scrutiny than marijuana use, the rate of frequent alcohol use in Minnesota is also an area of concern, particularly if daily alcohol consumption is increasing, as the data suggests. The latest research on alcohol consumption finds that there is no “safe” level of alcohol consumption. Alcohol is a carcinogen directly responsible for more than 1,000 deaths in Minnesota each year and indirectly implicated in many more.
If some of Minnesota’s drinkers switched to cannabis, it could be a net benefit to public health, given the increased risks associated with daily alcohol consumption.
But so far the signs on that front are mixed: While the share of Minnesotans who drink monthly has declined modestly, the rate of daily alcohol consumption has increased along with the rise in heavy marijuana use.
Data suggests, for example, that tens of thousands of Minnesotans now use alcohol and cannabis daily, greatly increasing their risk of addiction and health problems.
Keynote USA
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