HOLY SMOKES

Teens’ Weed Vaping Soars, but They’re Drinking Less Booze and Rejecting Hard Drugs

The number of teens who say they vape marijuana has nearly doubled in the past year, but alcohol is getting less and less popular.

The number of teens vaping marijuana has nearly doubled in the past year—but they’re increasingly turning their backs on booze and hard drugs. The findings were published Wednesday in the annual survey from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and reported by The New York Times. Of the 12th graders who took the survey, 14 percent said they had vaped marijuana in the last month, which is nearly twice as many as the 7.5 percent reported a year ago. The percentage of teenagers overall who said they had vaped marijuana in the past year also doubled, rising to 7 percent for eighth graders, 19.4 percent for 10th graders, and 20.8 percent for 12th graders. “This is a very, very worrisome trend,” said Nora Volkow, director of NIDA. However, only 52 percent of high-school seniors said they had used alcohol in the last year. That’s a big decline from the figures in the year 2000, when 73.2 percent of 12th graders said they’d had a drink.