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The use of cannabis has soared in the United States since the end of the 2000s, even before certain states, including Colorado and Washington, legalized its recreational use. This is what emerges from a large-scale study which highlights at the same time that the number of daily or almost daily cannabis consumers now exceeds that of alcohol consumers. Explanations.
Many countries around the world have legalized or decriminalized the recreational use of cannabis in recent years, with Germany being the latest European country to have taken the plunge. But what about the evolution of this consumption in the long term? This is the question asked by researcher Jonathan Paul Caulkins, professor at Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania), who evaluated cannabis consumption in the United States between 1979 and 2022. And the conclusions of his research are striking to say the least: not only has the use of cannabis grown significantly since the end of the 2000s, but daily consumption of the substance now exceeds that of alcohol in the country of Uncle Sam.
Cannabis consumption estimated through several surveys
“The data comes from self-reported surveys, but the considerable changes in self-reported rates of cannabis use, particularly daily or near-daily use, suggest that changes in actual use have been considerable. It is striking to note that frequent use of cannabis is now reported more often than frequent use of alcohol“, explains the author of this work in a press release.
To arrive at this observation, the researcher based himself on two national surveys, the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. All compiling data from no less than 1.6 million people surveyed between 1979 and 2022. Cannabis consumption rates were compared during four key years in terms of political changes in the United States, namely 1979, 1992, 2008 and 2022. Note that the author of this research did not just take into account the prevalence, namely the number of consumers noted in the population at a specific time, but also the number of days of consumption .
A boom in daily consumption
Published in the newspaper Addiction, this work reveals that reported cannabis use first declined to its lowest level in 1992, then experienced “partial increases” until 2008, before completely skyrocketing. In more detail, the rate of reporting cannabis use per capita in the past year increased by 120% between 2008 and 2022, while the number of days of use reported per capita increased by 218%. If we now look at the period 1992-2022, the rate of declaration of daily or almost daily consumption, still per capita, has quite simply and simply multiplied by fifteen.
The final observation and not the least, if there were ten times more daily or almost daily alcohol consumers than cannabis users in 1992, namely 8.9 million compared to 0.9 million, the trend is increasing. is completely reversed in 2022. Americans consuming cannabis daily – or almost daily – now outnumber those consuming alcohol daily or almost daily – i.e. 17.7 million compared to 14.7 million.