Young adults’ use of vapes and cannabis hit all-time highs last year, according to the results of a large new national survey conducted at the University of Michigan.
The percentage of young adults who said they’d used nicotine vapes in the past 30 days reached the highest levels since the question was first added to the survey in 2017, more than tripling to 19%. For cannabis, 29% of young adults between the ages of 19-30 said they’d used the drug in the past 30 days — just slightly below the all-time high of 30% the previous year. A record high of 12% reported daily cannabis use.
The annual Monitoring the Future survey, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health, gathers data from about 20,000 Americans spanning the ages of 19 to 65. Overall, this year’s report presents a mixed picture of substance use trends in the U.S, according to Nora Volkow, director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
“It is reassuring to continue to see relatively low smoking rates and a continuing decline in alcohol use among adults,” Volkow said in a press release. “At the same time, rising rates of cannabis, nicotine, and certain other drug use warrant attention. Continued monitoring is vital for understanding the changing drug landscape so that we can develop effective interventions to support public health.”
Alcohol is still by far the most common substance among adults of all ages, with around 60% of young adults and adults between 35-50 reporting drinking in the last 30 days. But overall alcohol use continued to decline.
Another positive trend, as Volkow noted, was the waning popularity of cigarettes, with just 8% of young adults reporting use in the past 30 days. “Cigarette smoking among young adults has been declining steadily since 2004, but the rate of decline may be plateauing,” the survey’s authors write.
The survey first began asking about nicotine pouches like Zyn in 2023. Since then, use among young adults in the last 12 months has more than doubled from 5% to 13%. (The survey did not ask about pouch use in the past 30 days.)
Among other noteworthy findings was a slight uptick in heroin use among young adults, which rose from 0.2% in 2024 to 0.6% in 2025, and a decrease in the use of psychedelics, down from 9% to 7%.
The findings on vaping come amid controversial recent moves by the Trump administration that critics warn could increase underage people’s access to sweet, appealing fruit-flavored vapes. This spring, the Food and Drug Administration authorized fruit-flavored vapes for the first time, albeit ones that contain age-gated technology meant to stop people under 21 from using them. Shortly after, the agency announced that, under certain conditions, it would not prioritize enforcement against unauthorized fruit-flavored vapes that are already on the market.
While e-cigarettes may be helpful for people who smoke looking to switch to alternatives that pose fewer risks to their health, they can also pose a real problem for young people who start out with vapes and become addicted to nicotine, said Stefanie Gratale, an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Public Health focused on approaches to tobacco control.
“It’s difficult to pinpoint one cause for observed trends, but access to unauthorized flavored e-cigarette products, difficulty in enforcing regulations, and competing priorities in siloed regulatory approaches at state and federal levels can all play a role,” Gratale said via email. “Taken together, the new findings give us pause and reflect a need to think intentionally about how public messaging and policy can work together to communicate the dangers of individual products and the spectrum of risks across products in order to best protect young people.”
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