The Daily Flip

When the feds released their big drug survey this summer, the headline everyone ran was that daily weed use had finally passed daily drinking. That's true. It's also a year late.

I went back through SAMHSA's own tables for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the government's main read on who uses what. The flip didn't happen in 2025. In 2023 it was a dead heat. In 2024 cannabis pulled ahead. What 2025 did was make it obvious, and not because more people started smoking. Because more people stopped drinking.

• 21.4 million Americans 12 and older used cannabis on 20 or more of the past 30 days in 2025. 17.2 million drank that often.
• 48.8% of people who used cannabis in the past month used it almost every day. For alcohol it was 13.3%.
• Since 2021, daily drinkers are down 24% and daily cannabis users are up 21%.

The numbers, year by year

The survey counts someone as a daily or almost daily user if they used on 20 or more of the past 30 days. Same test for weed and for booze, which is what makes this comparison fair.

Look at 2023. Cannabis was at 20,972,000. Alcohol was at 20,954,000. That's 18,000 people apart. In 2024 cannabis was ahead by about 2.6 million.

Then look at 2025. Daily cannabis actually slipped a little, from 21.6 million to 21.4 million, which SAMHSA doesn't count as a real change. Daily drinking fell by almost 2 million. The gap got wider because the drinkers left, not because the smokers showed up.

Cannabis also beat the other daily habits. 19.9 million people smoked cigarettes every single day of the month, and 17.5 million vaped nicotine almost daily.

Drinking is still bigger. Weed is stickier.

None of this means more people use cannabis than alcohol. They don't. 129.1 million Americans had a drink in the past month. 43.8 million used cannabis. Alcohol is still the most common substance in the country by a mile.

The difference is how people use it. Most drinkers have a few drinks a month. Nearly half of cannabis users are in it every day. If you run a dispensary that's not news. Your regulars aren't buying for a party, they're buying for Tuesday. A small group of customers buys most of the product, and they come back every week.

It's not the kids. It's not even the young adults.

This is where the story people expect falls apart.

Young adults use cannabis daily about five times as often as they drink daily. But their daily cannabis use is going down, from 12.9% in 2022 to 10.6% in 2025. Their daily drinking is down too, from 3.6% in 2021 to 2.0%.

The real flip is in the 26 and over crowd. In 2024, adults 26 and older still had more daily drinkers (18.1 million) than daily cannabis users (17.1 million). In 2025 that switched. Cannabis held flat at 17.1 million and daily drinking dropped to 16.4 million. 2025 is the first year in this survey's current run that grown adults are more likely to smoke every day than drink every day.

Count all adults 18 and up and daily cannabis use went from 17.2 million in 2021 to 20.9 million in 2025, up about 22%. Daily drinking among adults went from 22.4 million to 17.1 million.

Where it's still close

The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study follows the same people from high school into their 60s, so it can split adults finer. Megan Patrick's paper in the journal Addiction used their 2023 data:

• Ages 19 to 30: 10.4% used cannabis daily or almost daily, 3.6% drank that often.
• Ages 35 to 50: basically tied, 7.5% cannabis and 7.8% alcohol. Patrick calls it a convergence, not a crossover.
• Ages 55 to 65: drinking still wins easily, 11.4% to 5.2%.

Then the 2025 panel results came out in August. Daily cannabis among 35 to 50 year olds jumped from 6.6% in 2024 to 8.5% in 2025, according to NIH. Midlife is the age group to watch next.

What it means if you're in this business

The teen numbers keep falling, which I covered in The Kids Quit. The Grown-Ups Didn't. This is the other half. The customer driving cannabis isn't a college kid. It's someone with a mortgage who used to have two glasses of wine after work and now has an edible or a joint instead.

That customer shops differently. They want consistency, they want to know what they're getting, and they come back. They aren't impressed by the newest drop, they want the thing that worked last week. Stores that build around that person, with dosing they can trust and staff who remember them, are the ones that hold on to the most valuable buyer in the market.

And if you sell alcohol, the warning is right there in the federal data. Your daily customer is leaving, and a lot of them aren't going sober.

One caveat. These are surveys, so people are reporting on themselves. As legal weed gets more normal, some people may just be more willing to admit they use it every day. But daily drinking falling 24% in four years isn't a reporting quirk. People are changing what they reach for at the end of the day.

Sources

• SAMHSA, 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Detailed Tables, Section 9 (Tables 9.38A/B, 9.40A/B, 9.41A/B, 9.42A/B): https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt57152/2025-nsduh-detailed-tabs/2025-nsduh-detailed-tables-sect9pe.htm
• SAMHSA, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators, 2025 NSDUH: https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt57150/2025-nsduh-annual-national-report.pdf
• Daily or almost daily definition (20+ of past 30 days), HHS Healthy People 2030: https://odphp.health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/browse-objectives/drug-and-alcohol-use/reduce-proportion-adults-who-use-marijuana-daily-or-almost-daily-past-month-su-08/data-methodology
• Patrick, M.E., "Daily or near daily cannabis and alcohol use by adults in the United States," Addiction 2025;120:779-782: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16748
• NIH, Monitoring the Future panel 2025 results (Aug 12, 2026): https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/elevated-use-cannabis-nicotine-among-us-adults-continues-into-2025