Daily marijuana use by college students surpasses cigarettes for the first time, survey shows

A smoker holds a cigarette outside Cleveland State University in 2012, before the college banned smoking on campus. More college students are smoking marijuana daily than cigarettes, a new study says. (Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)

By Karen Farkas, 
CLEVELAND, Ohio - More college students are using marijuana daily than smoking cigarettes, according to a national survey released Tuesday.
One in 17 students report using marijuana 20 or more times in the past 30 days in 2014, according to the annual survey of students by University of Michigan researchers.
The 5.9 percent rate is the highest since 1980, when the national survey about drug, alcohol and cigarette use was first conducted.

In 2007 the daily or near-daily rate of use was 3.5 percent.
"It's clear that for the past seven or eight years there has been an increase in marijuana use among the nation's college students," Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator of the study, said in a statement. "And this largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high school seniors."
Five percent of college students said they smoked cigarettes daily, compared with 19 percent in 1999 — a drop of nearly three fourths, the study said.

Smoking tobacco using a hookah (a type of water pipe) in the prior 12 months rose substantially among college students, from 26 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2014.
The Monitoring the Future study has surveyed full-time college students one to four years beyond high school each year for 35 years, starting in 1980. The annual samples range between 1,000 and 1,500 per year.
Following are other results of the study.

Drug use
Five out of every 10 college students have not used any illicit drug in the past year, and more than three-quarters have not used any in the prior month.

Amphetamines: Non-medical use of amphetamines in the prior 12 months nearly doubled between 2008 (when 5.7 percent said they used) and 2012 (when 11.1 percent used), before leveling at 10.1 percent in 2014.

Ecstasy (MDMA, sometimes called Molly): About 5.8 percent, similar to the level in 2012. Past 12-month use had more than doubled from 2.2 percent in 2007 to 5.8 percent in 2012, before leveling, the study said.

Cocaine: Past-year use showed a statistically significant increase from 2.7 percent in 2013 to 4.4 percent in 2014.

Synthetic marijuana (also called K-2 or spice): Use has dropped sharply since first measured in 2011, likely because students see it as dangerous. In 2011 7.4 percent of college students indicated having used synthetic marijuana in the prior 12 months; by 2014 the rate had fallen to just 0.9 percent.

Salvia: Use of salvia — a hallucinogenic plant  — fell from an annual prevalence of 5.8 percent in 2009 to 1.1 percent in 2014.

Non-medical use of narcotic drugs: Use declined, falling from 8.8 percent reporting past-year use in 2006 to 4.8 percent by 2014.

Tranquilizers: Non-medical use has fallen by nearly half since 2003, when 6.9 percent reported past-year use, to 2014, when 3.5 percent did.

LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs: Past-year usage rates at 2.2 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively.

Alcohol:  63 percent of college students in 2014 said that they have had an alcoholic beverage at least once in the prior 30 days, compared to 67 percent in 2000 and 82 percent in 1981.
The proportion of the nation's college students saying they have been drunk in the past 30 days was 43 percent in 2014, down some from 48 percent in 2006.

Binge drinking: Between 1980 and 2014, college students' rates declined 9 percentage points from 44 percent to 35 percent. Binge drinking was defined as five or more drinks in a row on at least one occasion in the prior two weeks.