Image by Getty / FuturismExperts are mighty puzzled after finding that teens are abstaining from drugs more than ever before.In the latest update from the University of Michigan's half-century-long Monitoring the Future study, the school announced that its researchers found a trend of "historically large decreases" in adolescent drug use has only broadened in 2024.Richard Miech, the study's team lead, said he was surprised by the findings."I expected adolescent drug use would rebound at least partially after the large declines that took place during the pandemic onset in 2020," Miech said.In 2024, the study's investigators looked at data from more than 24,000 high school students in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades at more than 270 schools, both public and private.As Miech noted in the press release, the peri-pandemic wave of drug abstention was the largest ever to be recorded but experts expected "that drug use would resurge as the pandemic receded and social distancing restrictions were lifted.""As it turns out," he said, "the declines have not only lasted but have dropped further."In 2024, the researchers found that a whopping 67 percent of high school seniors abstained from drugs (including marijuana), alcohol, and smoking or vaping nicotine within 30 months of being surveyed. In 2017, when the Monitoring the Future study first began looking into drug and alcohol use among teens, that cohort was a far lower 53 percent.Among high school sophomores, 80 percent said they hadn't had any drugs, alcohol, or nicotine in 30 days, and 90 percent of eighth graders said the same. In 2017, those proportions were 69 percent and 80 percent, respectively.As Miech said in an NIH press release, kids who were in eighth grade at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic are now high school seniors and their "unique cohort has ushered in the lowest rates of substance use weve seen in decades."Though drug use rates have, as the UM press release notes, been falling since the 1990s, this post-pandemic plummet is nevertheless significant."This trend in the reduction of substance use among teenagers is unprecedented," explained Nora Volkow, the director of the NIHs National Institute on Drug Abuse, in the agency's statement. "We must continue to investigate factors that have contributed to this lowered risk of substance use to tailor interventions to support the continuation of this trend."More on drugs: Elon Musk's Drug Use Becoming a Problem for Government Security ClearanceShare This Article