Teens just aren’t the hooligans they used to be, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. In the latest Monitoring the Future survey of nearly 45,000 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders, investigators found that America’s youth are drinking, smoking, and tripping less than in the past.
Use of alcohol in the past month fell among all three groups to 22 percent, the lowest level since the survey began in 1975. Rates of recent binge drinking went down, too, plummeting to 11 percent from a high of 22 percent set in 1997. Cigarettes are less cool than ever, as lighting up also reached a historic low. In fact, more high school seniors are smoking pot than cigarettes daily — 6 percent versus 5.5 percent — for the first time in the study’s 41-year history, mainly because of a decrease in cigarette use (daily blazing has held steady over the past five years). Overall drug use (including opioids, ecstasy, amphetamines, and synthetic cannabinoids) is down, too.
We can only guess that instead of taking smoke breaks and getting wasted, teens are probably playing with Snapchat filters.
