For years, opponents of marijuana legalization warned that letting adults buy cannabis legally would open the floodgates for teenage use. New federal data says otherwise. According to the CDC’s 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), current cannabis use among high school students has fallen to its lowest point in more than three decades.

This isn’t a minor dip. It’s part of a sustained, decade-long decline that has continued even as more states built out legal, regulated markets for adult-use cannabis. Nearly half the country now allows adults to purchase marijuana legally, and teen use rates have moved in the opposite direction predicted by prohibition advocates.

The numbers matter because they cut directly against one of the most repeated arguments against legalization: that regulated access normalizes cannabis for young people and makes it easier for them to get. The data tells a different story, and it’s backed by multiple independent federal surveys, not just one agency’s findings.

What Does the Latest CDC Data Show About Teen Marijuana Use?

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System found that 12.9% of high school students reported current marijuana use in 2025, meaning they’d used it at least once in the past 30 days. That’s down from 17% in 2023 and a steep drop from 23.1% in 2011, the year before the first states approved recreational legalization.

Lifetime use tells a similar story. The share of high schoolers who say they’ve ever tried cannabis fell from 39.9% in 2011 to just 25.5% in 2025, according to CDC’s own reporting on the survey results.

Both trend lines point the same direction: down, and substantially so, even as the legal cannabis industry has expanded into new states nearly every election cycle.

NORML noted that current use among high schoolers has fallen roughly 60% over the past decade, calling it the lowest rate recorded in more than 30 years of tracking. NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano summed up what the data means for policymakers: “Sensational claims that adult-use legalization laws are linked with greater marijuana use by teens are simply not backed by reliable data.”

How Much Has Youth Cannabis Use Dropped Since States Started Legalizing?

Since 2012, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational cannabis, current use among high schoolers has dropped by 44%. That’s a massive shift for a policy that critics claimed would send teen use rates soaring.

State-level data backs up the national trend. A Marijuana Policy Project analysis found that youth marijuana use declined in 19 of 21 states that legalized adult-use cannabis, with the earliest legalizing states seeing an average 35% drop in teen consumption. That’s not a coincidence limited to one or two states. It’s a pattern showing up almost everywhere legalization has taken hold.

The consistency across states matters here. If legalization were driving youth access the way opponents predicted, states with mature legal markets should show higher teen use rates than states without one. Instead, the opposite pattern shows up in state after state, year after year.

Were Prohibitionists Wrong About Legalization and Teen Access?

The core argument against legalization has always centered on kids: give adults legal access, and teens will find it easier to get their hands on cannabis too. That prediction hasn’t held up against a decade of actual data.

Regulated markets require age verification at the point of sale. Licensed dispensaries check ID, face licensing consequences for selling to minors, and operate under far more scrutiny than the unregulated dealers who controlled the market before legalization. Removing cannabis sales from an unregulated street market, where no one checks age, and placing it into a licensed retail environment appears to have made it harder, not easier, for teens to buy.

Two research letters published by the Journal of the American Medical Association reached the same conclusion: there’s no evidence that state legalization laws have increased youth cannabis use, and the opening of retail stores specifically didn’t move the needle either. A federal official said much the same in 2023, acknowledging that teen use “has not really” tracked with the spread of state legalization.

What Do Other Federal Studies Say About Youth Marijuana Use?

The CDC isn’t an outlier here. Multiple independent federal data sources point to the same downward trend among adolescents:

• The 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, run by SAMHSA, found that 8.7% of people ages 12 to 17 used marijuana in the past year, down from 14.2% in 2011. Past-month use among that age group dropped from 6.1% in 2021 to 5.0% in 2025.
  
• The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, found cannabis use among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders has remained stable or declined even as legalization expanded to more states.

SAMHSA’s Christopher D. Carroll pointed to this pattern as part of a larger trend, noting that adolescents and young adults have shown “downward or stable trends in most behavioral health indicators over the past five years.”

Interestingly, adult marijuana use rose over the same period, with past-month use among all age groups increasing from 13.2% in 2021 to 15.1% in 2025. Legal access appears to be expanding among the adults it’s intended for while shrinking among the teens it isn’t.

Why Might Legal Markets Reduce Teen Access to Cannabis?

A few explanations line up with the data. Licensed retailers check identification, and most states impose real penalties, including license revocation, for selling to minors. That’s a stronger deterrent than anything the illicit market ever offered.

Legal markets also shift the entire supply chain away from informal sources like older friends, siblings, or street dealers, who historically served as the main access point for underage users. When cannabis sales move into regulated storefronts, that informal pipeline shrinks.

Public education campaigns tied to legalization rollouts may play a role too, along with broader cultural shifts in how teens spend their time. Whatever the exact mix of causes, the outcome is measurable and consistent across state lines and multiple federal surveys.

Canada’s experience adds another data point. A federally funded study found youth marijuana use declined after the country legalized cannabis nationally in 2018, and a follow-up government report showed youth use rates held steady in the years since.

What This Means for the Future of Cannabis Policy

The data now spans multiple countries, dozens of states, and more than a decade of tracking. Every major federal survey, from the CDC to SAMHSA to NIDA, shows the same thing: legalizing cannabis for adults has not increased teen use. If anything, it’s coincided with the steepest declines in youth consumption ever recorded.

For lawmakers still weighing legalization bills, this is about as clear a signal as public health data gets. The fear that drove years of resistance to reform simply hasn’t materialized. Instead, regulated markets seem to be doing exactly what supporters argued they would: keeping cannabis out of the hands of minors while giving adults a safer, tested, legal alternative to the illicit market.

As more states consider legalization and federal reform continues to gain traction, this data set will likely become a central talking point. It’s hard to argue against a policy on the grounds of protecting kids when the evidence shows kids are safer under it than they were before.

Frequently Asked Questions

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• Cannabis Use Among Teens Declines Despite Increased Legalization Efforts Over The Years
• Colorado Study Shows Teen Marijuana Use Continues to Decline
• Teen Marijuana Use Drops Nearly 20 Percent Over Past Decade Amid Marijuana Legalization, Says Latest Government Data
• Cannabis Use Among Youth Hits New Lows in Minnesota After Legalization
• Adult-Use Cannabis Legalization Itself Doesn’t Raise Youth Usage Rates Per Study