Marijuana use remains on the rise among US college students, but narcotic drug use declines
September 8, 2016
Science Daily/University of Michigan
College student marijuana use continues its nearly decade-long increase, according to the most recent national Monitoring the Future study.
In 2015, 38 percent of college students said they had used marijuana in the prior 12 months, up from 30 percent in 2006.
Daily or near-daily use of marijuana (having used 20 or more times in the prior 30 days) also has increased in recent years for college students, rising from 3.5 percent in 2007 to 5.9 percent in 2014 -- the highest level of daily use measured in the last 34 years.
However, in 2015 their daily use fell back some to 4.6 percent, or one in every 22 college students. A decline in the degree of risk of harm associated with using marijuana may account for much of the increase in use. Since 2003, proportions of 19-to-22-year-olds seeing regular use of marijuana as dangerous to the user has fallen sharply -- from 58 percent in 2003 to 33 percent by 2015.
"This increase in use and decrease in perceived risk of harm regarding marijuana use should be taken seriously by college administrators, parents and students themselves. We know through other research that frequent marijuana use can adversely affect academic performance and college completion," said John Schulenberg, one of the study's lead researchers and research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.
In contrast to the story for marijuana use, other types of drug use are declining among college students. Nonmedical use of prescription narcotic drugs has been declining among college students since reaching a high in 2006 of 8.8 percent annual prevalence (that is, any use in the prior 12 months). By 2015, 3.3 percent of college students reported using any narcotic drug in the past 12 months without medical supervision -- a drop of about six-tenths.
"It appears that college students, at least, are hearing and heeding the warnings about the very considerable dangers of using narcotic drugs," said Lloyd Johnston, the study's principal investigator and ISR distinguished senior research scientist and research professor.
Use of heroin, another narcotic drug, has been low among college students for many years. The highest annual prevalence recorded since 1980 was in 1998 at 0.6 percent, but the rate has been at or under 0.3 percent since 2005 and was down to 0.1 percent in 2015.
Use of amphetamines has started to decline among college students. From 2008 through 2012, the percentage of college students who reported using an amphetamine without medical supervision in the prior 12 months rose from 5.7 percent to 11.1 percent, likely due to more students using them to improve their academic performance. But, by the time of the latest survey in 2015, that had fallen slightly to 9.7 percent.
"It appears that the increase in nonmedical use of prescription stimulant drugs may have passed its peak, though about one in 10 college students still report using them in the prior 12 months," Johnston said.
The use of MDMA (ecstasy and more recently "Molly") had made a bit of a comeback among college students between 2007 and 2012, but has been in decline since then. Annual prevalence in 2015 was 4.2 percent.
Certain drugs have declined in popularity quite rapidly among the nation's college students. For example, past-year use of synthetic marijuana, which is usually sold over the counter under such brand names as "K-2" and "Spice," dropped from 8.5 percent when first measured in 2011 to just 1.5 percent in 2015 -- a decline of about 80 percent. Salvia has fallen from 5.8 percent when its use was first measured in 2009 to just 0.4 percent in 2015 -- a decrease of more than 90 percent.
Some other drugs never gained much of a foothold on American college campuses. Past-year use of so-called "bath salts," a form of synthetic stimulants usually sold over the counter, has never exceeded 0.3 percent among college students since first being measured in 2012, and stands at 0.1 percent in 2015.
Past-year use of inhalants has been below 2 percent since 2005. The so-called "club drugs," Rohypnol and GHB, never really caught on, and have had negligible rates of use among college students.
Annual nonprescribed use of tranquilizers (4.3 percent) and sedatives (2.3 percent) has changed little in recent years, although these annual prevalence rates in 2015 are below those observed in the college population in the early 2000s.
In general, college males are more likely than college females to use nearly all of the illicit drugs. Sedatives are the primary exception; and there the genders are very close in their annual prevalence rates.
Cigarettes and Alcohol
Cigarette smoking continues to decline gradually among college students, but the cumulative drop over the past 16 years has been dramatic. A peak rate of any smoking in the prior 30 days was reached in 1999 at 31 percent.
By 2015, the rate had fallen by nearly two-thirds to 11 percent, a record low. Daily smoking declined even more, from 19.3 percent in 1999 to 4.2 percent in 2015 -- a drop of nearly four-fifths and also a record low since 1980.
"The study shows that large declines in smoking rates have been occurring among secondary school students, as well," Johnston said. "So much of the improvement among college students actually began when they were still in high school."
Their high school classmates not in college have dramatically higher rates of smoking. In 2015, 23 percent of them indicated past-month smoking, compared to 11 percent among the college students.
Heavy smoking is even more concentrated among those not in college, with their half-pack-or-more-per-day smoking rate at 9.1 percent versus 1.4 percent among college students.
"Cigarette smoking has become increasingly concentrated among the less educated," Johnston said.
Through 1993, college females had higher rates of smoking than college males; but since 1994, the opposite is true.
Electronic vaporizers, which include e-cigarettes, were used in the month prior to the survey by 14 percent of college males and 6 percent of college females.
Alcohol clearly remains the drug of choice among college students, with 79 percent indicating that they used in the past 12 months and 63 percent in the past 30 days.
Indeed, 62 percent said they were drunk at least once in the past 12 months and 38 percent in the past 30 days. So drinking and drunkenness remain quite commonplace on the nation's college campuses, even though there has been some modest falloff in these rates since the early 1980s.
Binge drinking -- defined as having five or more drinks on at least one occasion in the past two weeks -- was reported by 40 percent of all college students in 2015 (close to the 38 percent who reported being drunk in the last month).
While the rate of binge drinking has gradually declined among college males over the past 30 years, there has been very little change in the rate among college females, resulting in some closing of the gap between genders (though males have consistently had a higher rate of binge drinking).
"Of even greater concern than binge drinking is what we have called 'extreme binge drinking,' defined as having 10 or more drinks -- or even 15 or more drinks -- on at least one occasion in the prior two weeks," Johnston said.
Over the years 2011 to 2015 combined, about one in nine college students reported having 10 or more drinks in a row on at least one occasion in the prior two weeks, while one in 25 reported having 15 or more drinks in a row at least once in the same interval.
"Drinking at these levels can result in alcohol poisoning, serious accidents, and a host of unwise and dangerous behaviors," Johnston said. "So this remains a serious problem to be addressed."
The Monitoring the Future study is now in its 42nd year. Starting in 1980, the study has included nationally representative samples of full-time college students who are one to four years beyond high school. The annual samples of college students have ranged between 1,000 and 1,500 per year.
MTF is an investigator-initiated research undertaking, conceived and conducted by a team of research professors (listed as authors below) at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. It is funded under a series of peer-reviewed, competitive research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of Health.
MTF also conducts an annual national survey of high school seniors, from which a random, nationally representative subsample is drawn for follow-up by mail in future years. Of these follow-up respondents, those who are one to four years beyond high school and who report being in a two-year or four-year college full-time in March comprise the college student sample each year. They are not drawn from particular colleges or universities, which helps to make the sample more representative of the wide range of two- and four-year institutions of higher education in the country.
The findings presented here are drawn from Chapters 8 and 9 in this newly published monograph: Johnston, L.D., O'Malley, P.M, Bachman, J.G., Schulenberg, J.E. & Miech, R. A. (2016). Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2015: Volume 2, College students and adults ages 19-55. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan, 427 pp. Available at myumi.ch/65jNB.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160908083815.htm
Daily marijuana use among U.S. college students highest since 1980
September 1, 2015
Science Daily/University of Michigan
Daily marijuana use among the nation's college students is on the rise, surpassing daily cigarette smoking for the first time in 2014.
A series of national surveys of U.S. college students, as part of the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study, shows that marijuana use has been growing slowly on the nation's campuses since 2006.
Daily or near-daily marijuana use was reported by 5.9 percent of college students in 2014 -- the highest rate since 1980, the first year that complete college data were available in the study. This rate of use is up from 3.5 percent in 2007. In other words, one in every 17 college students is smoking marijuana on a daily or near-daily basis, defined as use on 20 or more occasions in the prior 30 days.
Other measures of marijuana use have also shown an increase: The percent using marijuana once or more in the prior 30 days rose from 17 percent in 2006 to 21 percent in 2014. Use in the prior 12 months rose from 30 percent in 2006 to 34 percent in 2014. Both of these measures leveled in 2014.
"It's clear that for the past seven or eight years there has been an increase in marijuana use among the nation's college students," said Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator of the study. "And this largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high school seniors."
Much of this increase may be due to the fact that marijuana use at any level has come to be seen as dangerous by fewer adolescents and young adults. For example, while 55 percent of all 19-to-22-year-old high school graduates saw regular marijuana use as dangerous in 2006, only 35 percent saw it as dangerous by 2014.
The study also found that the proportion of college students using any illicit drug, including marijuana, in the prior 12 months rose from 34 percent in 2006 to 41 percent in 2013 before falling off some to 39 percent in 2014. That seven-year increase was driven primarily by the increase in marijuana use, though marijuana was not the only drug on the rise.
The proportion of college students using any illicit drug other than marijuana in the prior 12 months increased from 15 percent in 2008 -- the recent low point -- to 21 percent in 2014, including a continuing increase in 2014. The increase appears attributable mostly to college students' increased use of amphetamines (without a doctor's orders) and use of ecstasy.
These and other results about drug use come from Monitoring the Future, an annual survey that has been reporting on U.S. college students' substance use of all kinds for 35 years. The study began in 1980 and is conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of Health.
College students' nonmedical use of amphetamines in the prior 12 months nearly doubled between 2008 (when 5.7 percent said they used) and 2012 (when 11.1 percent used), before leveling at 10.1 percent in 2014.
"It seems likely that this increase in amphetamine use on the college campus resulted from more students using these drugs to try to improve their studies and test performance," Johnston said.
Their age-peer high school graduates not in college had higher-reported amphetamine use for many years (1983-2008), but after 2010, college students have had the higher rate of use.
"Fortunately, their use of these drugs appears to have leveled among college students, at least," he said.
Ecstasy (MDMA, sometimes called Molly), had somewhat of a comeback in use among college students from 2007 through 2012, with past 12-month use more than doubling from 2.2 percent in 2007 to 5.8 percent in 2012, before leveling. Previously, ecstasy had fallen from favor among college students. By 2004, it had fallen to quite low levels and then remained at low levels through 2007.
Past-year use of cocaine showed a statistically significant increase from 2.7 percent in 2013 to 4.4 percent in 2014.
"We are being cautious in interpreting this one-year increase, which we do not see among high school students; but we do see some increase in cocaine use in other young adult age bands, so there may in fact be an increase in cocaine use beginning to occur," Johnston said. "There is some more welcome news for parents as they send their children off to college this fall. Perhaps the most important is that five out of every 10 college students have not used any illicit drug in the past year, and more than three quarters have not used any in the prior month."
In addition, the use of synthetic marijuana (also called K-2 or spice) has been dropping sharply since its use was first measured in 2011. At that time, 7.4 percent of college students indicated having used synthetic marijuana in the prior 12 months; by 2014 the rate had fallen to just 0.9 percent, including a significant decline in use in 2014. One reason for the decline in synthetic drug use is that an increasing number of young people see it as dangerous.
Likewise, college students' use of salvia -- a hallucinogenic plant which became popular in recent years -- fell from an annual prevalence of 5.8 percent in 2009 to just 1.1 percent in 2014.
The nonmedical use of narcotic drugs -- which has accounted for an increasing number of deaths in recent years according to official statistics -- actually has been declining among college students, falling from 8.8 percent reporting past-year use in 2006 down to 4.8 percent by 2014. This is a particularly welcome improvement from a public health point of view, note the investigators.
There is no evidence of a shift over from narcotic drugs to heroin use in this population. Use of heroin has been very low among college students over the past five years or so -- lower than it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The non-medical use of tranquilizers by college students has fallen by nearly half since 2003, when 6.9 percent reported past-year use, to 2014, when 3.5 percent did.
The use of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, once popular in this age group, remains at low levels of use on campus, with past-year usage rates at 2.2 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. And use of the so-called club drugs (Ketamine, GHB, Rohypnol) remains very low. Further, the use of so-called bath salts (synthetic stimulants often sold over the counter) never caught on among college students, who have a negligible rate of use.
In sum, quite a number of drugs have been fading in popularity on U.S. college campuses in recent years, and a similar pattern is found among youth who do not attend college. Two of the newer drugs, synthetic marijuana and salvia, have shown steep declines in use. Other drugs are showing more gradual declines, including narcotic drugs other than heroin, sedatives and tranquilizers -- all used nonmedically -- as well as inhalants and hallucinogens.
On the other hand, past-year and past-month marijuana use increased from 2006 through 2013 before leveling; and daily marijuana use continues to grow, reaching the highest level seen in the past 35 years in 2014 (5.9 percent). Amphetamine use grew fairly sharply on campus between 2008 and 2012, and it then stabilized at high levels not seen since the mid-1980s.
Ecstasy use has made somewhat of a rebound since the recent low observed among college students in 2007. Cocaine use among college students is well below the 1980s and 1990s rates, but the significant increase in 2014 among college students suggests a need to watch this drug carefully in the future.
ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO
Use of a number of licit drugs is also covered in the MTF surveys, including alcoholic beverages and various tobacco products.
While 63 percent of college students in 2014 said that they have had an alcoholic beverage at least once in the prior 30 days, that figure is down a bit from 67 percent in 2000 and down considerably from 82 percent in 1981. The proportion of the nation's college students saying they have been drunk in the past 30 days was 43 percent in 2014, down some from 48 percent in 2006.
Occasions of heavy or binge drinking -- here defined as having five or more drinks in a row on at least one occasion in the prior two weeks -- have consistently had a higher prevalence among college students than among their fellow high school classmates who are not in college.
Still, between 1980 and 2014, college students' rates of such drinking declined 9 percentage points from 44 percent to 35 percent, while their noncollege peers declined 12 percentage points from 41 percent to 29 percent, and high school seniors' rates declined 22 percentage points from 41 percent to 19 percent.
Of particular concern is the extent of extreme binge drinking in college, first defined as having 10 or more drinks in a row at least once in the prior two weeks, and then defined as having 15 or more drinks in a row in that same time interval. Based on the combined years 2005-2014, the estimates for these two behaviors among college students are 13 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
"Despite the modest improvements in drinking alcohol at college, there are still a sizable number of students who consume alcohol at particularly dangerous levels," Johnston said.
Cigarette smoking continued to decline among the nation's college students in 2014, when 13 percent said they had smoked one or more cigarettes in the prior 30 days, down from 14 percent in 2013 and from the recent high of 31 percent in 1999 -- a decline of more than half. As for daily smoking, only 5 percent indicated smoking at that level, compared with 19 percent in 1999 -- a drop of nearly three fourths in the number of college students smoking daily.
"These declines in smoking at college are largely the result of fewer of these students smoking when they were still in high school," Johnston said. "Nevertheless, it is particularly good news that their smoking rates have fallen so substantially."
Unfortunately, the appreciable declines in cigarette smoking have been accompanied by some increases in the use of other forms of tobacco or nicotine. Smoking tobacco using a hookah (a type of water pipe) in the prior 12 months rose substantially among college students, from 26 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2014.
In 2014, the use of e-cigarettes in the past 30 days stood at 9.7 percent, while use of flavored little cigars stood at 9.8 percent, of regular little cigars at 8.6 percent and of large cigars at 8.4 percent. The study will continue tracking the extent to which these alternate forms of tobacco use are changing in popularity, not only among college students, but also among their age peers not in college and among secondary school students.
The full report is available online at: http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-vol2_2014.pdf
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150901095321.htm