Daily Marijuana Use Now Tops Alcohol and Cigarettes, Federal Data Shows

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A federal survey buried in bureaucratic formatting just delivered one of the more telling data points in modern drug policy: more Americans now smoke, vape, or otherwise use marijuana every day or nearly every day than drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes on that same daily basis. According to new 2025 figures from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 21.4 million people fall into that daily or near-daily marijuana category, compared to 19.9 million for cigarettes and 17.2 million for alcohol. That's not marijuana edging out one legacy vice -- it's marijuana passing both at once, for the first time on record.

This didn't come out of nowhere. Carnegie Mellon researcher Jonathan Caulkins flagged the alcohol crossover back in 2022, and the pattern has only sharpened since. What makes the timing notable is that it lands squarely in the middle of an active federal rescheduling process, where the Justice Department, DEA, and courts are all wrestling with how cannabis should be classified under the Controlled Substances Act. Numbers like these don't settle that fight, but they're about to become a permanent fixture in it.

What the New Federal Numbers Actually Show

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The figures come from SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the federal government's long-running annual instrument for tracking how Americans use alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. This year's release, covering 2025 patterns, found 21.4 million people reporting daily or near-daily marijuana use, against 19.9 million for cigarettes and 17.2 million for alcohol. The comparison started making the rounds widely after researcher Charles Fain Lehman posted about it on July 27, 2026, and it spread quickly among policy writers and researchers because of what it represents: not marijuana nudging past one substance, but overtaking both simultaneously.

That distinction matters. Plenty of prior surveys have shown cannabis use climbing steadily as legalization expanded state by state, but this is the first time in the survey's history that daily marijuana use has outranked both cigarettes and alcohol in the same dataset. Because SAMHSA runs this survey every year with a consistent methodology, it functions as one of the few reliable longitudinal benchmarks for this kind of comparison -- researchers aren't stitching together data from different sources with different definitions of daily use. That consistency is exactly why the crossover is being treated as a real signal rather than statistical noise.

The 2022 Milestone That Started This Trend

Marijuana has overtaken cigarettes and alcohol as the substance most commonly used daily or near-daily, with 21.4 million users compared to 19.9 million for cigarettes and 17.2 million for alcohol.

This isn't the first time researchers have caught marijuana overtaking a legacy substance. Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon, first documented cannabis passing alcohol using 2022 survey data, publishing the analysis in the journal Addiction in 2024. At that point, he found 17.7 million Americans using marijuana daily or near-daily compared to 14.7 million drinking that frequently. It was the first time marijuana had overtaken alcohol specifically, and it drew attention well beyond drug policy circles because alcohol had always been assumed to be the default heavy-use substance in America.

Caulkins' broader point was about trajectory, not just a single crossover. He calculated that per-capita daily or near-daily marijuana use rose roughly 15-fold between 1992 and 2022 -- a staggering climb by any standard. He also noted something that reframes how we should think about cannabis use patterns generally: about 40% of current marijuana users consume it daily or near daily, a usage pattern that looks a lot more like tobacco use than like typical alcohol consumption, where most drinkers have a drink occasionally rather than every day.

The new 2025 numbers confirm that 2022 wasn't a fluke tied to pandemic-era stress drinking or a temporary dip in cigarette use. It's an accelerating trend, and marijuana has now cleared cigarettes too, a substance whose daily-use rates have been declining for decades thanks to sustained public health campaigns. Marijuana moved in the opposite direction.

Young Adults Are Driving Part of the Picture

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Young adults remain the demographic doing the heaviest lifting in these numbers. Among 18 to 25 year olds, past-year illicit drug use came in at 36.3%, and marijuana use specifically accounted for 33.7% of that age group -- meaning nearly all of the illicit drug use reported by young adults is marijuana use. That's a useful detail because it pushes back on any assumption that rising drug use figures reflect a broad expansion into harder substances; for this age bracket, it's overwhelmingly cannabis.

Zoom out to past-month use of any illicit drug or alcohol among the same 18 to 25 group, and the figure jumps to 52.8%. More than half of young adults are using something in a given month, and marijuana is clearly the dominant driver within that broader figure.

These numbers land at an interesting moment for a generation that's grown up with legal or medical marijuana available in a majority of states. Frequent use hasn't leveled off as access has become more normalized -- if anything, the daily-use pattern has deepened alongside legalization. Worth remembering here: marijuana's legal status still varies enormously depending on where you live, whether that's state to state within the U.S. or country to country internationally, and readers should check their local laws rather than assume legality follows national trend lines.

How This Lands Amid the Rescheduling Fight

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All of this is unfolding while the federal government is mid-process on rescheduling marijuana, which gives these usage figures political weight they wouldn't otherwise carry. Trump signed an executive order on December 18, 2025, directing the Attorney General to finish the rescheduling rulemaking as quickly as possible. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche followed through on April 23, 2026, with an order moving FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III. Recreational marijuana, along with any product that isn't FDA-approved or state-licensed for medical use, stays put in Schedule I.

The process hasn't been clean. DEA selected seven participants for its rescheduling hearing on June 18, 2026, and all seven reportedly oppose further rescheduling -- a lineup that critics say stacked the proceeding before it even started. That hearing ran from June 29 through a target close of July 15, 2026, while legal challenges to the April order remain pending at the D.C. Circuit.

Into that contested environment drops a data point that both sides can spin. Reform advocates will point to the daily-use numbers as evidence that cannabis use has fully normalized into everyday American life, no different in scale from cigarettes or alcohol, and therefore deserving of a regulatory framework that matches reality rather than a decades-old prohibition model. Opponents will point to the same numbers as a public health red flag -- daily use at this scale, especially concentrated among young adults, is exactly the kind of pattern that worries addiction researchers, regardless of how legal the product is in a given state.

What's easy to miss in the legalization headlines is that the real cultural shift isn't just about more states passing ballot measures -- it's about how people are using the plant once it's available. Moving from occasional use to daily or near-daily use is a different kind of relationship with a substance, and the pattern tracks closely with what public health researchers watched happen with tobacco decades ago: a substance that starts as occasional and social becomes, for a meaningful share of users, a daily habit.

Federal policy hasn't caught up to that reality yet. Recreational marijuana sits frozen in Schedule I even as FDA-approved products and state-licensed medical cannabis get waved through to Schedule III, a split classification that reflects political compromise more than any coherent read of how Americans actually use the drug day to day.

Expect these usage figures to keep resurfacing -- in the D.C. Circuit litigation over the April rescheduling order, in whatever comes out of DEA's hearing process, and in any congressional debate that eventually tries to write federal cannabis policy from scratch rather than patching it state by state. Numbers like 21.4 million daily users don't resolve the scheduling fight, but they make it a lot harder to argue the current framework still matches the country it's regulating.