Cambridge, MA: Nearly one-in-four US adults say that they have consumed cannabis within the past year, according to data published in the journal BMJ Open.
Researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston assessed marijuana use data from a nationally representative sample of over 35,000 US adults.
They reported, “Overall, 53.5 percent of the US adult population reported ever using marijuana between 2005 and 2018. The prevalence of lifetime marijuana use, and first use before the age of 18, remained stable between 2005 and 2018. Overall 22.6 percent of US adults reported using marijuana within the last year.”
Consistent with prior studies, authors found evidence that those young adults who consume cannabis are doing so more frequently, but they did not report that a greater overall percentage of young adults overall were now using it.
Full text of the study, “Retrospective cross-sectional analysis of the changes in marijuana use in the USA, 2005-2018,” appears in BMJ Open.