Daily Cannabis Use Pulls Ahead of Alcohol and Cigarettes

More Americans now use cannabis on a daily or near-daily basis than drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes that often. The finding comes from the federal government’s newest count of American substance use, the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration on July 27, 2026. The survey¹ counted 21.4 million people aged 12 or older who used marijuana on 20 or more days in the past month, above the 17.2 million who drank alcohol that frequently and the 19.9 million who smoked cigarettes daily.

It is the first year the survey has placed cannabis ahead of both legal substances on this measure. Daily or near-daily marijuana use also ran ahead of nicotine vaping, cigars and smokeless tobacco. The result lands with some irony: cannabis remains largely prohibited under federal law, while the two substances it now outpaces are legal and sold on nearly every corner.

The number is real. It also deserves a closer read than the headline invites.

The three figures are not measured the same way

The data are also self-reported and cross-sectional. The survey interviews more than 60,000 people about their use in the past month and past year; it is a snapshot of what people say they do, not a clinical assessment of dependence. Those caveats do not undo the trend, but they set the terms for reading it. This is population surveillance, useful for tracking direction over time, not a measure of harm to any one person.

A ranking of frequency, not reach

That pattern has a peer-reviewed track record. A 2024 analysis in Addiction by Carnegie Mellon researcher Jonathan Caulkins found that daily cannabis use first passed daily drinking in the 2022 survey data, after a roughly 15-fold rise in the per-capita rate of near-daily use since 1992. The same work showed why. Far more people drink, but high-frequency drinking is uncommon: the median drinker reported alcohol on four to five days a month, against 15 to 16 days for the median cannabis user. The 2025 figures extend that trajectory and add cigarettes to the list cannabis has passed.

Why frequent use is the number that matters

The same report carries a finding that cuts against a common concern. Past-year marijuana use among 12- to 17-year-olds was 8.7 percent, down from 14.2 percent in 2011, the year before the first states legalized adult use, and past-month use in that age group fell between 2021 and 2025. The growth is concentrated in adults; adolescent use has kept drifting down even as more states open legal markets.

None of this settles what daily cannabis use does to health. It sharpens the question. The survey shows that a growing share of Americans have folded cannabis into their daily routine the way earlier generations folded in a drink or a cigarette, and some appear to be using it in place of those substances. Whether that trade is a net gain or a new set of risks is the clinical question the count cannot answer, and the one the next round of research has to take up.

References:

^{1. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health” (2026). Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, SAMHSA. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt57150/2025-nsduh-annual-national-report.pdf}