The number of 16- to 24-year-olds who use cannabis has halved since the 90s. But what’s driving the change?
Weed, pot, dope… whatever you call it, cannabis has been the most-used illicit drug in the UK for decades, and 16- to 24-year-olds have long been the cohort that uses it the most. But a drop in overall drug use among young people (from 21 per cent in the year ending March 2020 to 18 per cent in 2023) has been attributed mostly to a drop in cannabis use, which begs the question: is cannabis really losing its grip?
According to government data, cannabis use among young people peaked at 28 per cent in 1997 and fell steadily until it hit an all-time low of 13 per cent in 2013. The latest data, from the year ending March 2023, shows a 4 per cent decline in cannabis use among 16- to 24-year-olds, while the percentage of adults aged 16 to 59 using cannabis has stayed steady at 8 per cent.
It’s important to note here that government data on drug use isn’t the most accurate, and the true figure for young people using cannabis is likely to be much higher, especially among certain subsets of the population. A small survey by the harm reduction organisations NeuroSight and Drugsand.me conducted in 2020, for example, found that 86 per cent of students aged 18 to 23 said they used cannabis, with 29 per cent using it every day or almost every day, 25 per cent multiple times a week and 9 per cent at least once a week.
The point is, not everyone feels comfortable disclosing illicit drug use as part of a government survey, so it’s important to take the data (and any conclusions that are drawn from it) with a pinch of salt. That said, anecdotally speaking, some researchers feel the tide is genuinely changing when it comes to young people and weed. “I've got this kind of gut feeling around the younger generations, that their use of drugs and alcohol is much more moderate than older generations,” says Paul North, harm reduction expert and director of the drug policy website Volteface. “When I do talks in schools and universities I’ve noticed that the young people I speak to are less enthusiastic about cannabis, and less interested in drugs in general.”
For North, a 4 per cent drop in use is significant enough to indicate that young people are using cannabis less – but why? North believes it has something to do with the increasing sober curiosity (in 2019, more than a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds never drank alcohol). “One of the observations people are making about Gen Z is that they’re not really going out and partying,” says North. “My feeling is that they’re a little bit more health conscious and mindful about what they put into their bodies.”
Jack*, 22, a freelancer from Sheffield who asked to remain anonymous, has cut down on weed in the last year after deciding to take a more mindful approach to their cannabis consumption. “I started smoking weed at 17 and it quickly became a regular thing for me,” they tell Dazed. While they first started using weed for fun and to wind down, they say it sometimes became a bit of a crutch. “Sometimes it was healthy, sometimes it wasn’t,” they explain. “It depended on how badly my life was going at the time; if I was in a good place I was more mindful of when and why I was using, if not then it was really easy just to smoke my problems away and that for me that is when it wasn’t healthy.”
They continue: “It was affecting sleep, I began to notice I was becoming dependent, affecting work, became less of something I did for fun and more of a habit.”
@emibaus13 24 days of #quittingweed with my sobriety guru @Ran rhymes and a little bit on why i quit since so many people have been asking =] but i’ll definitley go into this more in other videos! 🫶🏼 sleep still so bad so so bad but im riding it out still like johnny utah boiii #quittingsmoking #abstenence ♬ Howl's Moving Castle - Merry Go Round of Life - Vitamin String Quartet
When Jack’s friends started to think more critically about their consumption of drugs and alcohol, they felt it was a good idea to do the same. “I don’t like the idea of being dependent on a substance,” they say. “I wanted to get back to what it was like when I first started smoking and enjoy it again, to have it as a little treat instead of smoking being something I just do mindlessly. I still smoke, but maybe once a week, if that. Ideally I’d smoke less but I enjoy it so I’ve never felt the need to cut it out entirely.”
A couple of people Dazed spoke to for this article said they didn’t smoke at all or at least very rarely – one due to religious reasons and another, a 22-year-old postgraduate student from North Wales, because they simply aren’t interested. “I’ve never enjoyed the feeling of it and also don’t like the smell, so it would be a waste of money to me,” they tell Dazed. “If it was legal and sold in shops I might be more inclined to buy edibles, especially if my friends were, but I still wouldn’t smoke.” Laura, 23, a student from South Wales, tells Dazed that she consumes cannabis less than four times a year simply because it makes her nauseous. “I prefer to drink alcohol,” she says. Another student from North Wales tells us that they don’t bother with cannabis because it doesn’t fit into their schedule. “It doesn’t faze me to do it, but I don’t have an issue with it,” they say.
While the vast majority of young people don’t use cannabis regularly, North believes it’s likely that there’s a cohort who may have been more likely to start using if they hadn’t come of age during lockdown. “There must be a demographic of people who, on average, would have used that locked down time to go out and socialise and maybe come across drugs and use drugs, but didn’t have that opportunity,” he says. “And since they lost that time, they may have taken a path by which they don’t use drugs at all.” North also cites the cost of living as a possible factor – a theory which chimes with Jack, who says it’s likely they’d have smoked more if it wasn’t for the cost.
“I’ve noticed that the young people I speak to are less enthusiastic about cannabis, and less interested in drugs in general [...] my feeling is that they’re a little bit more health conscious and mindful about what they put into their bodies” — Paul North
For others, though, the pandemic led to them smoking more cannabis more frequently than before. Charlie, 23, a technology graduate from Manchester, started smoking recreationally when he was 16, but it was only when he went to university that he started to smoke on a weekly basis. “By my second year of university I was smoking four to five times a week, but it was when I took a year out of university to stay with my mum during lockdown that I started smoking daily.” Charlie moved home during the pandemic and worked as a chef in a restaurant. “I’d smoke every night after work to settle my nerves after a busy shift,” he recalls. From there, he continued to smoke daily for around three years, until he started his first graduate job in 2023.
“The summer between my master’s and my job, I was going through seven grams a week because all I did was sit at home and smoke,” he says. “It was pretty bad. Once I started my corporate job I wanted to cut down so I tried doing weekends only but I found myself craving it and quite often I would give in. I was back to around four to five days a week.”
While the notion of dependency is a controversial one in the cannabis community, a lot of habitual smokers will attest to the difficulty that comes with trying to quit (while it varies for everyone, withdrawal symptoms include lack of appetite, anxiety, loss of sleep, night sweats, nightmares and shakiness and can last for 30 days) – and just because someone is using regularly, it doesn’t mean they want to be.
Although Charlie intends to cut down his smoking, at the very least to weekends only, he’s yet to make the change. Why? He says he doesn’t know: “willpower, addiction, habit – I could give loads of reasons but a pretty big one is just habit, and the fact that my housemate and I are just as bad as each other.”
And, of course, Dazed heard from numerous regular cannabis users who weren’t interested in stopping any time soon. One student, from Salford, says that using weed “makes coping with life easier and helps with my depression,” while another student living in Manchester, Cara, says smoking “is the best thing to bring me back down to earth and calm me down” after working long hours and dealing with the pressures of adult life.
Whether cannabis use is truly on the decline or not, it appears that many young people are now thinking about cannabis the same way they think about alcohol: as something to use sparingly or, at the very least, mindfully. As more of us come of age, time will tell how our attitudes around health and wellness shape our future drug use.