On Monday, Smart Approaches to Marijuana President and CEO Dr. Kevin Sabet spoke at a key event in fighting addiction: a webinar run by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) focused on major epidemiological trends in marijuana with a particular focus on youth and young adults as well as the changing policy landscape including the potential negative impacts of state legalization—and views on how to protect kids from this dangerous drug. His co-panelist was Rear Adm. Christopher Jones, an eminent figure in battling addiction and aiding recovery currently serving as SAMHSA’s Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention.
This is a crucial subject, addressed at a crucial time: The Trump administration faces a pivotal choice on easing federal restrictions around marijuana; doing so would supercharge youth use thanks to massively increased advertising power for the industry.
Some of the issues and data points at play here are found below.
Rising levels of marijuana potency
In the days of “Woodstock weed,” average plant potency was around 3% THC. Now, thanks to the efforts of an industry energized by state legalization programs, that’s hovering at around 20% for plants and 95% and 99% for concentrates. This has turned marijuana into even more of a public health menace and is clearly connected to the drug’s horrific effects on mental health.
As Sabet put it: “We’re at levels of potency we’ve never been at before. We’re creating products that have never existed before . . . . We are now seeing industrialized THC.”
Legalization = normalization
Creating state-level programs for “legal” weed has had a deleterious effect on both the number of people using marijuana and the wider way it’s perceived by the public. Recent data the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows that marijuana use among young people in legal states consistently outpaces use in that group in non-legal states: 43.9% of 18-25 year olds across legal states on average are past-year users, vs. 33.2% in non-legal states—a difference of more than 32%.
And no wonder: Kids simply don’t get how dangerous marijuana is these days. In 1994, per University of Michigan research, 71.3% of high schooler correctly associated “great risk” with using marijuana regularly. Now, that number has utterly collapsed: In 2024 only 35.9% said the same, a drop of almost 50%. That’s thanks to the massive policy changes put in place since then—the top 10 states for 12-17 year old use all have some legal program, and nine of them have legal recreational—plus the ceaseless efforts of Big Weed to rebrand their drug as natural and harmless. The worst irony? Weed has actually gotten more dangerous thanks to potency hikes.
It’s not just kids getting hit, by the way: Colorado, the pioneer state of legal recreational weed, saw daily or near daily use among adult users jump from 12.5% in 2016 (a few years after legalization) to 52.3% in 2022. That’s a more than fourfold increase. States cannot deal with this. The fact is the “patchwork of laws has made states become their own FDA, but they don’t have the capacity to do that.” And that’s showing in places like Colorado and other states that have legalized. The effects are more uncontrolled and worse than ever.
Marijuana IS dangerous
This trend has very bad, very real effects.
“The marijuana industry has done a very good job of telling people marijuana isn’t addictive,” noted Sabet. Trouble is, that’s simply not true.
First, marijuana use has come to play a significant role in the overall uptrend among general substance abuse in America: Per NSDUH data, 2024 saw 20.1 million cases of marijuana use disorder, vastly more than opioids, cocaine, and meth. Those numbers are also climbing for marijuana even as they declined over that period for almost all other drugs including alcohol. And speaking of alcohol: By 2022 there were more daily or near-daily users of marijuana in America than there were of alcohol, a major shift driven by an 1867% increase in daily weed use.
Weed is now the most common substance among 12-25 year olds being treated for a substance abuse disorder, outpatient or inpatient. In 2024, emergency room visits linked to marijuana surpassed those driven by opioids, and the slice of those visits related only to marijuana use has risen from 37% in 2021 to 58% in 2024. The combo of normalization and sky-high potency is just as deadly as you’d think.
On mental health, too: One study estimated that as much as 30% of schizophrenia cases among young men were linked to marijuana. No shock there: data suggests that the number of lifetime uses of the drug is intimately linked to schizophrenia rates and that using the drug young drives that risk even higher.
The turning tide
Despite the predictions of the industry and its apostles in the media and policy worlds, the victory of weed over public health is not inevitable. The tide is turning.
As Sabet noted, “Media outlets that had said ‘everything’s OK’ are now doing investigative reports” into the massive harms and damages of the drug
Another: look at the fact that since 2022, seven of 10 states have rejected legalization measures at the ballot box. Or that just between 2022 and 2024, Gallup polling on the issue of whether weed use has a positive of negative effect on American society showed a big directional spike toward “negative” (leaping from 50% to 54%). The same polling around individual effects is even clearer, with a jump from 45% to 51% toward “negative.” People are waking up.
What can I do?
If you’re looking for resources on marijuana, SAM is a great place to start. And if you want to know more about our sister organization the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions and its blueprint for beating addiction and encouraging recovery, click here.