Daily Marijuana Use Now Tops Alcohol and Cigarettes in the US for the First Time
For the first time in recorded federal data, more Americans use marijuana on a daily or near-daily basis than drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes at comparable frequencies. The 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) on July 27, 2026, shows that an estimated 21.4 million people aged 12 and older consumed marijuana on 20 or more days in the past month. That figure exceeds the 19.9 million daily cigarette smokers and the 17.2 million people who drank alcohol daily or near-daily under the same threshold.
This crossover represents a major shift in American substance use patterns. Marijuana has moved from occasional or recreational use for many into a habitual daily practice that now outranks the country’s two most established legal daily habits. The data also show marijuana surpassing daily or near-daily nicotine vaping (17.5 million), cigar smoking (2 million), and smokeless tobacco use (4.3 million).
A Long-Building Trend Reaches a Milestone
The 2025 numbers build on earlier findings. An analysis by Carnegie Mellon University researcher Jonathan Caulkins, published in the journal Addiction in 2024 and drawing on decades of NSDUH data, found that daily or near-daily cannabis use first surpassed the equivalent level of alcohol use in 2022, with 17.7 million marijuana users versus 14.7 million drinkers. In 1992, at the low point for cannabis, fewer than one million people reported near-daily use, while nearly nine million drank at that intensity. The per capita rate of daily or near-daily cannabis use rose roughly 15-fold between 1992 and 2022.
Between 2021 and 2025 the divergence accelerated. Daily or near-daily marijuana use climbed 21 percent, from 17.7 million to 21.4 million. Over the same period, daily cigarette smoking fell 28 percent (from 27.5 million to 19.9 million) and daily or near-daily drinking dropped 24 percent (from 22.5 million to 17.2 million). These declines in tobacco and alcohol reflect decades of public health campaigns, higher prices, restrictions on advertising, and shifting social norms. Marijuana moved in the opposite direction as legalization expanded and stigma declined.
Among people who used marijuana at all in the past year, the share using it daily or near-daily reached 27.4 percent in 2025. Some analyses of current users put the daily or near-daily share near half. This pattern of frequent use more closely resembles traditional cigarette smoking than the typical pattern for alcohol, where most drinkers consume far less often. In earlier data, the median marijuana user reported consumption on 15–16 days in the past month, while the median drinker reported only 4–5 days.
Rising Dependence and Broader Use
Past-year marijuana use itself rose from 53.2 million people (19.0 percent) in 2021 to 61.6 million (21.2 percent) in 2025. Growth has been especially strong among adults 26 and older. The survey also recorded 19.3 million Americans meeting clinical criteria for marijuana use disorder in 2025, up 16 percent from 16.7 million in 2021. That places marijuana second only to alcohol use disorder (25.7 million) and well ahead of opioid use disorder (about 4 million). Roughly one in three past-year marijuana users met criteria for the disorder. Among young adults aged 18–25, about one in seven (14.1 percent) of the entire age group had marijuana use disorder.
The gap between alcohol and marijuana use disorders has narrowed. Alcohol use disorder declined by roughly four million people since 2021 while marijuana use disorder rose by 2.7 million. Four years earlier the difference stood at about 13 million; by 2025 it had fallen to 6.4 million.
Driving under the influence figures also narrowed. An estimated 10.3 million people reported driving under the influence of marijuana in the past year, approaching the 12.6 million who reported driving under the influence of alcohol.
Youth Trends Present a Mixed Picture
Overall adolescent use of marijuana continued to fall. Past-year use among 12- to 17-year-olds dropped from 10.9 percent in 2021 to 8.7 percent in 2025. Similar declines occurred for alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, and other substances, suggesting broader reductions in youth substance experimentation rather than a marijuana-specific effect. SAMHSA highlighted these positive trends among adolescents and young adults in its main release materials.
Yet intensity among the teens who do use has increased. The share of past-year adolescent users reporting daily or near-daily consumption rose, and the absolute number of teen daily or near-daily users reached about 327,000—the highest in the recent five-year window. More than one in three current teen users reported daily or near-daily use in the past month, and roughly half of past-year teen users met criteria for marijuana use disorder. Only 36 percent of adolescents perceived great risk in smoking marijuana weekly, indicating declining perceptions of harm.
Policy and Social Context
The rise in frequent use has occurred while marijuana remains largely prohibited at the federal level under the Controlled Substances Act, even as alcohol and tobacco are fully legal. Most states now permit medical or recreational use, and a majority of Americans live in jurisdictions with legal adult-use markets. The Trump administration has reclassified medical cannabis as a Schedule III substance and has considered further rescheduling steps. These policy changes, combined with commercial availability, product variety (flower, edibles, concentrates, vapes), and reduced social stigma, have normalized regular use for many adults.
Researchers and public health observers note that high-frequency cannabis use carries documented risks, including dependence, cognitive effects with heavy long-term use, mental health associations, and impaired driving. At the same time, the parallel declines in daily tobacco and alcohol use demonstrate that sustained public health efforts can change population behavior. Whether similar approaches will be applied to intensive marijuana use remains an open policy question as the substance becomes more mainstream.
The 2025 NSDUH rests on interviews with roughly 60,000 to 70,000 people and provides the most authoritative national estimates of substance use in the civilian, non-institutionalized population. Because five consecutive years of comparable data are now available after the survey’s 2020 redesign, trend comparisons from 2021 onward carry greater statistical confidence.
The data mark a clear cultural and behavioral transition. What was once primarily an occasional or countercultural substance has become, for more than 21 million Americans, a daily or near-daily practice that now exceeds the traditional daily rituals of drinking and cigarette smoking. How society, regulators, clinicians, and public health agencies respond to this new reality will shape the next chapter of American substance use policy.
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