This week, SAMHSA released the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which is the leading federal estimate of trends in drug, tobacco, and alcohol use. While there are many data points that will likely appear in future versions of the Friday Fact, today’s edition focuses on the number of monthly users of tobacco versus marijuana from 2003 to 2023:
Number of Past-Month Users of Marijuana and Tobacco Products (2003-2023):
Over the past 20 years, the number of past-month users of marijuana increased by 198.18%, from approximately 14.7 million in 2003 to 43.6 million in 2023, as the number of monthly users who used tobacco products decreased by 29.49%, from 70.8 million in 2003 to 49.9 million in 2023. If trends continue, there will soon be more past-month users of marijuana than tobacco.
These trends demonstrate that we have entered the phase of Big Tobacco 2.0, with the legalization of marijuana and the ensuing emergence of the profit-driven marijuana industry. As the nation has worked to overcome the harms of Big Tobacco, it has turned a blind eye to the next public health crisis: the rise of marijuana use. As Dr. Kevin Sabet stated “This latest data makes clear what we’ve said all along, the normalization and industrialization of today’s high potency THC drug products is a self-made public health crisis for this country.”