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A Statistical Milestone Years in the Making
For the first time in recorded federal survey history, cannabis has overtaken both alcohol and tobacco as the most commonly used substance on a daily basis in the United States. The finding, drawn from the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) — an annual report conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) — has attracted significant attention from public health researchers and drug policy analysts worldwide.
According to the survey, 21.4 million Americans aged 12 and over reported using cannabis on 20 or more days within a 30-day period, a threshold the study uses to define daily or near-daily consumption. By comparison, 19.9 million reported daily cigarette smoking and 17.2 million reported daily alcohol use. Daily cannabis consumption also surpassed nicotine vaping (17.5 million), cigars (2 million), and smokeless tobacco (4.3 million).
The figures represent the culmination of a long-running trend. A prior analysis of NSDUH data found that the per capita rate of daily cannabis use in the US has increased nearly fifteenfold since 1992. Separate polling by Gallup in 2024 corroborated the general direction: American adults now report being more likely to use cannabis than to smoke tobacco cigarettes.
Teen Use Continues to Fall
One data point in the report is likely to attract particular attention from European policymakers: despite the dramatic rise in overall adult cannabis consumption, adolescent use has continued to decline — even as more US jurisdictions have legalised cannabis for adults. This runs counter to one of the most persistent arguments made by opponents of regulated cannabis markets, namely that legalisation leads to increased use among young people.
Supporting data from the federally funded Monitoring the Future study found that younger adults — not teenagers — are nearly three times more likely than their peers to use cannabis daily compared to alcohol. The pattern suggests that legal, regulated frameworks may redirect consumption rather than simply amplify it across all age groups.
These findings echo conclusions reached in some European research contexts, where several studies have found that prohibition does not reliably suppress youth use, and that regulated environments paired with effective public education may reduce harm more successfully than blanket restriction.
What the Numbers Mean — and Don't Mean
It would be a mistake to read these figures purely as a cultural curiosity. Public health researchers have been careful to note that the survey measures frequency of use, not quantity or method of consumption, and makes no direct claims about dependence, disorder, or harm. Cannabis used daily for chronic pain management looks very different in a clinical profile from recreational heavy use — a distinction that raw usage statistics cannot capture.
What the data does illustrate is a profound shift in how a significant portion of the population relates to psychoactive substances. Cannabis — which remains federally prohibited in the United States under the Controlled Substances Act, albeit with recent movement toward reclassification — has effectively become the nation's most commonly used daily drug without the benefit of the full legal infrastructure that surrounds alcohol and tobacco.
Daily cannabis consumption in the US has increased nearly fifteenfold on a per capita basis since 1992, according to prior analysis of the same federal dataset.
A European Lens
For observers across the Atlantic, these figures arrive at a pivotal moment. Several European countries are in various stages of cannabis reform, including Germany's partial legalisation framework, which came into force in 2024, and ongoing regulatory experimentation in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The question of how normalised daily use interacts with public health outcomes, workplace productivity, and social norms is one that European health ministries are increasingly being asked to address with limited domestic data.
In Malta, where the 2021 Cannabis Act established one of the EU's most distinctive regulatory frameworks — permitting home cultivation and the formation of non-profit Cannabis Harm Reduction Associations (CHRAs) — the prevalence data from larger markets is watched with interest. The Authority on the Responsible Use of Cannabis (ARUC), which oversees the island's unique model, has consistently emphasised harm reduction and responsible consumption as the pillars of its approach, rather than simple access expansion.
Whether consumption patterns in Malta, a country of fewer than 550,000 people with a framework built around community associations rather than commercial retail, will ever be comparable to American trends remains an open question. But the broader lesson from the NSDUH data — that frequency of use rises when social stigma falls, and that this does not automatically translate into proportional increases in youth uptake or harm — is one that informs the evidence base on which frameworks like Malta's were constructed.
The Policy Paradox
Perhaps the most striking detail in the NSDUH report is what it implies about the relationship between legal status and prevalence. Cannabis achieved its position as America's most commonly used daily substance while still being federally prohibited — a paradox that complicates simplistic narratives in both directions. Prohibition advocates cannot credibly claim it suppressed use; but legalisation advocates must also grapple with the public health responsibilities that come with a substance used by tens of millions of people every day.
That tension — between access, autonomy, and harm reduction — is precisely the space that European regulators are now trying to navigate, with varying degrees of caution and ambition.
Sources:
Marijuana Moment — https://www.marijuanamoment.net/daily-marijuana-use-now-outpaces-alcohol-drinking-and-cigarette-smoking-federal-report-shows/
Featured image: Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels
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