For a century, the daily cigarette smoker was the face of American addiction. According to the federal government’s own data, he has just been replaced.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on Monday, and buried in its appendix tables is a milestone no federal survey has ever recorded: 21.4 million Americans now use marijuana daily or almost daily. That is more than the 19.9 million who smoke cigarettes daily, and well more than the 17.2 million who drink daily or almost daily.
The agency’s press materials led elsewhere, with encouraging trends among adolescents. The daily-use figures appear nowhere in the 157-page national report. They sit in Section 9 of the detailed tables, where the survey’s own significance testing marks nearly every marijuana measure that matters as a statistically significant increase since 2021.
The Numbers
| Measure (people 12+) | 2021 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily/almost-daily use, past month | 17.7M | 21.4M | +21% |
| vs. daily cigarette smokers | 27.5M | 19.9M | −28% |
| vs. daily/almost-daily drinkers | 22.5M | 17.2M | −24% |
| Daily/almost-daily use, past year | 13.3M | 16.9M | +27% |
| Marijuana use disorder | 16.7M | 19.3M | +16% |
| Past-year use | 53.2M (19.0%) | 61.6M (21.2%) | +16% |
| Share of users using daily | 25.0% | 27.4% | +2.4 pts |
Source: SAMHSA, 2025 NSDUH Detailed Tables 9.31, 9.38, 9.51, 9.11. All changes statistically significant per SAMHSA’s own testing.
The trend lines are moving in opposite directions. Since 2021, daily cigarette smoking has fallen by 7.6 million people and daily drinking by 5.3 million, the continued payoff of decades of public health work. Daily marijuana use rose by 3.7 million over the same four years. Nearly half of everyone who currently uses marijuana (48.8 percent) now uses it daily or almost daily.
America’s Second-Largest Addiction
The survey counted 19.3 million Americans meeting clinical criteria for marijuana use disorder in 2025, roughly one in three past-year users. That places marijuana second only to alcohol (25.7 million) among the nation’s substance use disorders, and nearly five times ahead of opioid use disorder (4.0 million).
The gap at the top is closing. Alcohol addiction has declined by 4 million since 2021; marijuana addiction has grown by 2.7 million. Both shifts are statistically significant. Four years ago the distance between America’s first- and second-largest addictions was 13 million people. It is now 6.4 million.
Among young adults aged 18 to 25, one in seven (14.1 percent of the entire age group) has marijuana use disorder.
The Teen Story Has Two Halves
Adolescent marijuana use fell again: past-year use among 12-to-17-year-olds dropped from 10.9 percent in 2021 to 8.7 percent in 2025, a significant decline that legalization advocates promoted within hours of the release.
The same tables complicate that story in two ways. First, the decline is not marijuana-specific. Teen alcohol use fell at a statistically indistinguishable rate over the same window, down roughly 20 percent, alongside nicotine, tobacco, and prescription-drug misuse. Youth use of virtually everything is falling.
Second, the teens still using marijuana are using it far more intensively. The share of adolescent past-year users consuming daily or almost daily jumped from 9.5 percent in 2023 to 14.7 percent in 2025, with every earlier year in the trend window significantly below 2025. More than one in three current teen users (36.8 percent) used daily or almost daily in the past month. And because heavy use held steady while casual use fell, the raw count of teen daily users, 327,000, is the highest in the five-year window. Half of teens who used marijuana in the past year already meet criteria for marijuana use disorder.
Perception is moving the other way: just 36 percent of adolescents see great risk in smoking marijuana weekly.
Elsewhere in the Survey
Past-year marijuana use reached 61.6 million Americans (21.2 percent), up significantly from 2021 though down from its 2024 peak. Adults 26 and older remain the engine of growth, up 24 percent since 2021, with daily use in that group up 33 percent. Past-month use among pregnant women rose from 5.1 percent to 6.7 percent, a change that did not reach statistical significance but will bear watching. And 10.3 million people reported driving under the influence of marijuana in the past year, approaching the 12.6 million who drove under the influence of alcohol.
The 2025 survey, drawn from interviews with roughly 70,000 Americans, is the fifth consecutive year of comparable data since the survey’s 2020 redesign, making this the first release in which four-to-five-year trends can be tested with confidence across the board. What those tests show is consistent: every major indicator of heavy marijuana use and marijuana addiction is significantly higher than in 2021.
The milestone itself required no test at all. The national report never mentions it; Table 9.38A states it plainly: in 2025, America’s most common daily drug habit is no longer tobacco.