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The Numbers That Complicate a Familiar Warning
One of the most persistent arguments against legalising cannabis for adults is the claim that doing so will inevitably expose more young people to the drug. New data from the United States suggests the opposite has been happening — and the findings are drawing attention from researchers and policymakers far beyond North America.
The 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), published by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), reports that 8.7 percent of people aged 12 to 17 used cannabis in the past year. That figure represents a significant fall from 14.2 percent recorded in 2011 — the year before any US state had legalised recreational cannabis use for adults. In the intervening years, dozens of states have enacted adult-use legalisation, yet adolescent consumption has moved in the opposite direction to what critics predicted.
The same survey found that past-month cannabis use among adolescents fell from 6.1 percent in 2021 to 5.0 percent in 2025, while use among adults aged 26 and older rose over the same period. Overall, more than a fifth of Americans aged 12 and above — roughly 61.6 million people — reported using cannabis in the past year, up from 19 percent in 2021.
A Pattern Repeated Across Multiple Studies
The NSDUH results do not stand alone. A report from the Marijuana Policy Project, an advocacy organisation, analysed data from 21 US states that had legalised adult cannabis use and found that youth consumption declined in 19 of them, with the earliest-legalising states recording an average drop of 35 percent among teenagers. The annual Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, found adolescent use remained stable or declined even as more states enacted reform.
Evidence from Canada — which legalised cannabis nationally in 2018 — points in a similar direction. A federally funded Canadian study found youth use rates fell following legalisation, and a government report confirmed that daily or near-daily use among both adults and young people has remained broadly steady in the six years since.
SAMHSA's Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Christopher D. Carroll, noted that "adolescents aged 12 to 17 and young adults aged 18 to 25 continued to show downward or stable trends in most behavioural health indicators over the past five years."
Why Regulation May Be the Point
Researchers and reform advocates point to a straightforward explanation: licensed retail environments require age verification in ways that illicit suppliers do not. When cannabis moves into a regulated market, the argument runs, the casual social and commercial networks through which teenagers have historically accessed it are at least partially disrupted. Unlicensed dealers have no commercial incentive to card customers; regulated retailers face legal consequences if they do not.
That logic has direct relevance to the European policy conversation. Several EU member states are at different stages of considering or implementing cannabis reform — Germany enacted a partial legalisation framework in 2024, and discussions are ongoing in France, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere. The question of youth exposure consistently features in those national debates, often cited by opponents as a reason to maintain prohibition.
Relevance for Malta's Regulatory Experiment
Malta, which in 2021 became the first EU member state to legalise personal cannabis use and cultivation for adults, is itself a test case for how a regulated framework interacts with youth access. The island's model — centred on non-commercial Cannabis Harm Reduction Associations (CHRAs) overseen by the Authority on the Responsible Use of Cannabis (ARUC) — is explicitly designed to move cannabis consumption away from the illicit market while embedding harm reduction principles into the structure of access itself.
ARUC has consistently described youth protection as a central pillar of its mandate. Under Maltese law, CHRA membership is restricted to adults aged 18 and over, and associations are required to maintain robust age-verification and safeguarding procedures. Whether Malta's approach produces measurable reductions in adolescent use comparable to those observed in larger legalised markets is a question that longitudinal local data — still limited at this early stage — will eventually need to answer.
For now, the accumulating international evidence offers a challenge to policymakers across Europe who continue to frame youth safety as a reason to resist regulated adult cannabis markets. The data, at least from the jurisdictions where reform has been in place the longest, does not support that framing.
Caveats Worth Noting
Survey-based drug use data carries inherent limitations. Self-reporting may be affected by social desirability, shifting legal norms around disclosure, and changes in how respondents interpret survey questions over time. The correlation between legalisation and falling youth use does not, by itself, establish causation — other factors, including shifting cultural attitudes and public health campaigns, may also be at play. Researchers have consistently urged caution in drawing firm causal conclusions, even while acknowledging the consistency of the trend across multiple independent datasets.
What is clear is that the predicted surge in teenage cannabis use following adult legalisation has not materialised in the United States, and has not been observed in Canada either. That evidence base will continue to grow — and European regulators, including those monitoring Malta's ongoing experiment, are watching it closely.
Sources:
Marijuana Moment — https://www.marijuanamoment.net/teen-marijuana-use-continues-to-decline-as-more-states-legalize-it-for-adults-federal-study-shows/
Featured image: Photo by Ksenia Chernaya on Pexels
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