The Kids Quit. The Grown-Ups Didn't.

Every year the feds drop a pile of survey data on who's smoking what, and every year the headlines run in two directions at once. Teen use is at or near historic lows. Adult cannabis use is at or near record highs. Both are true, and if you sell flower, grabba, vapes, pouches or anything else in this business, you should understand why.

I went through the main national surveys: the CDC and FDA's National Youth Tobacco Survey, the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study (which follows the same people from high school into their 60s), SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey and household health survey, and New York's own youth tobacco survey. Then I lined them up by age and by year.

High school: the vape boom is over

The high school vaping peak was 2019. That year 27.5% of high schoolers, about 4.1 million kids, had vaped in the past month, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey. By 2025 it was 7.1%.

The 2021 survey moved online during COVID, and the CDC says not to compare it directly with earlier years. The direction is still obvious.

Across all middle and high schoolers in 2025, 7.2% used any tobacco product in the past month, about 2 million kids, down from 11.3% in 2022. Among high schoolers alone it was 9.5%, down from 16.5% in 2022. Vapes were still the top product at 5.2% of all students. Cigarettes were 1.4%.

Monitoring the Future tells the same story grade by grade, and it goes back further.

Past-year cannabis use among 10th and 12th graders is the lowest Michigan has measured in three decades. Cannabis vaping fell too: 16.0% of seniors in 2025, down from 20.8% in 2019.

The number that should stop you is how many kids use nothing at all. In 2025, 90.6% of 8th graders, 81.6% of 10th graders and 66.2% of seniors used no alcohol, no cannabis and no nicotine in the past month. In 2019 those numbers were 82.2%, 64.8% and 53.8%. NIDA says abstention is holding at historically high levels, and Michigan reports record highs for 8th and 10th graders in a survey that has been running since 1975.

SAMHSA's household survey agrees on cannabis. Past-month marijuana use among 12 to 17 year olds was 5.0% in 2025, about 1.3 million kids, down from 6.1% in 2021. The CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which asks high schoolers in class, had current marijuana use at 12.9% in 2025, down from 22% in 2019 and 23% in 2013. The surveys ask different questions in different ways, so their numbers don't match, but every one of them points down.

The exception: seniors and nicotine pouches

There is one teen number going the wrong way. In 2025, 21.8% of 12th graders used some form of nicotine in the past month, up from 17.0% in 2024. That's a break from the decline that started in 2019. Vaping didn't drive it. Nicotine use other than vaping went from 7% to 12% of seniors in one year, after falling since 2017. Michigan says the jump came from small increases across several products, not one big one.

Pouches are part of it. Among seniors, past-year pouch use went from 2.9% in 2023 to 5.9% in 2024 to 6.9% in 2025. One in ten seniors has now tried them.

The youth tobacco survey shows the same product moving up. Pouch use among middle and high schoolers doubled from 0.8% in 2021 to 1.7% in 2025. FDA says it held steady between 2024 and 2025, but pouches are now the second most used tobacco product among kids after vapes, ahead of cigarettes. ZYN was the brand 69% of youth pouch users named, and 91% were using flavored pouches. A separate national study, TEEN+, found pouch use among 13 to 27 year olds nearly quadrupled between 2022 and 2025.

The kids who still vape tend to vape a lot. By FDA's count, among teens who vape, 41.2% use it on 20 or more days a month and 27.5% use it daily. A separate analysis in Pediatrics puts daily use even higher, around 35%. Two thirds use disposables, and Geek Bar was the brand 64% of them named.

The famous faces behind the pouch boom

Pouches aren't just a product story. They're a celebrity and political story too. In December 2024 Tucker Carlson started selling his own brand, ALP, a 50/50 joint venture between the Tucker Carlson Network and Turning Point Brands. He pitched it as "far better than Zyn," which he called "as dry as a teabag." By June 2026, Reuters reported ALP was the fourth or fifth biggest pouch brand in the U.S. with about 2% of the market, and said Carlson's popularity with Trump's base helped it get a foothold. ALP was set to start selling online in Europe in July 2026, with Conor McGregor signed on as a global brand partner. Turning Point Brands' pouch business, which sells both FRE and ALP, grew net sales 128% in the second quarter of 2026 to $68.4 million, almost half of the company's $142.9 million in sales.

The fight turned political before ALP even launched. In early 2024, after Chuck Schumer asked the FDA to look into Zyn and teens, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted that it "calls for a Zynsurrection," and Carlson became one of the right's best-known "Zynfluencers." His argument was that THC makes people lazy while nicotine keeps them productive. Not every Democrat lined up against pouches, either. Sen. John Fetterman said the government shouldn't be deciding which nicotine products are acceptable.

Carlson isn't alone. NELK, the YouTube crew that had Donald Trump on its Full Send podcast in 2022 and campaigned for him in 2024, sells its own Full Send nicotine pouches on fullsend.com: eight flavors from Grape Ice and Spearmint to Matcha and Cinnamon, in 4 and 8 milligrams, $30 for a roll of five cans. And Sesh, a pouch startup developed with the inventor of Zyn, raised $40 million in 2025 from Joe Lonsdale's 8VC, Post Malone, Diplo and comedian Andrew Schulz.

The surveys can't tell you whether any of this marketing moved the numbers. What they do show is pouch use climbing among high school seniors and adults 30 to 50 over the same years these brands went mainstream, and already at 24.5% past-year use among college men.

Hemp THC reached the kids, then started to fade

Monitoring the Future started asking about delta-8 a few years ago. In 2023, about 11% of seniors said they'd used it in the past year. In 2024 it was about 12%. In 2025 Michigan widened the question to include delta-10 and HHC, and 9.2% of seniors said they'd used one of them. The 2024 and 2025 questions aren't the same, so the drop isn't exact, but Michigan reads it as a decline. That's the market the federal hemp cap takes off the shelf on December 11, when products with more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container lose hemp status.

College age: the split is between college and everyone else

This is where it gets interesting. Monitoring the Future follows its high school seniors into their twenties, and it breaks out 19 to 22 year olds who are full-time college students from those who aren't. The two groups look nothing alike. When I say "college" and "not in college" below, I mean people the same age, 19 to 22, split by whether they're full-time college students.

Monitoring the Future counts daily use as 20 or more times in the past 30 days. Put simply, about 5 out of every 100 college students use cannabis daily, against about 13 out of every 100 of their same-age peers who aren't in college. Daily cannabis use among college students is about where it was ten years ago. Among their peers who aren't in school, it's more than double. Nicotine vaping is the widest gap of all: in 2025, 32.6% of 19 to 22 year olds outside college vaped nicotine in the past year, against 21.0% of college students.

Pouches flip the pattern. College students were more likely to report them: 14.4% in the past year, against 8.5% of their non-college peers, and 24.5% among college men.

A separate study of 40,250 students at 53 North American colleges, from the 2016-17 Healthy Minds Study, found 20.7% had used cannabis in the past 30 days. Cannabis users were far more likely to smoke cigarettes too, 26.4% against 6.0% of students who didn't use cannabis. That data is older and it only counts cigarettes, but it shows nicotine and cannabis tend to go together on campus.

Cannabis use climbs once kids leave high school. Past-year cannabis was 25.7% for seniors in 2025, then 39.4% for college students and 43.9% for 19 to 22 year olds not in college.

Young adults: daily cannabis keeps climbing

Look at everyone 19 to 30, and daily cannabis, nicotine vaping, and pouches are all up.

Past-year cannabis dipped in 2025, but daily use hit 11.8%, the highest in the series. More than one in ten adults under 30 uses cannabis almost every day. Pouches went from 4.8% in 2023 to 12.7% in two years.

Every age group, side by side

SAMHSA's survey covers everyone 12 and older, which makes it the best place to compare age groups year by year.

Adults 26 and older are the only group where both marijuana and nicotine vaping are higher than when the series started. That older group is what lifted the national number: SAMHSA counts 61.6 million Americans who used marijuana in the past year in 2025, 21.2% of everyone 12 and up, up from 19.0% in 2021.

How people use it changes with age, too. Among past-month users in 2025, 69.8% of 12 to 17 year olds vaped marijuana, against 54.3% of 18 to 25 year olds and 31.6% of adults 26 and older. Across all past-year users, 74.8% smoked it, 49.2% ate or drank it, 39.2% vaped it and 14.5% dabbed concentrates. Those add up to well over 100%, because plenty of people do more than one.

And it's not casual for everyone. In 2025, 19.3 million people met the criteria for marijuana use "disorder." More than half of those cases were mild, and about 18% were severe. That's up from 2021, though a little lower than in 2024. By age, it was 4.4% of teens, 14.1% of 18 to 25 year olds, and 5.7% of adults 26 and older. Teens have the lowest rate, but when they do have a problem, it's more often serious: a third of teens with the disorder had a severe case, against 14% of adults 26 and older. It looks like we all have it. ha ha ha

Adults: cigarettes are dying, nicotine isn't

Adult smoking in America is now under 10%. Preliminary CDC numbers put it at 9.1% in 2025, down from 9.9% in 2024, the second year in a row under 10%. In 1965 it was 42.4%. Gallup had it at 11% in 2024, tied for the lowest in eight decades of asking.

Gallup's July 2026 poll, a phone survey of 1,200 adults with a margin of error of about 4 points, came at it from the other side. It found 17% of adults smoke marijuana, tying the record from 2023 and up from 7% in 2013, while 11% smoke cigarettes, matching the record low. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 23% smoke marijuana. Among 30 to 49 year olds it's 25%, and that's also the age group most likely to smoke cigarettes, at 16%. Gallup also asked about nicotine pouches for the first time: 4% of adults used them in the past week, including 5% of 18 to 29 year olds and 7% of 30 to 49 year olds. It's a past-week poll of a much smaller sample, so don't line it up decimal for decimal with the federal surveys. The direction is the same.

But here's the part the "smoking is over" headlines skip. Between 2017 and 2023, exclusive cigarette smokers dropped by 6.8 million people while exclusive vapers rose by 7.2 million, and the CDC's own read is no net change in overall adult tobacco use. SAMHSA has 22.1% of Americans 12 and up using some nicotine product in the past month in 2025, 64.2 million people, with no change since 2022.

Some of the biggest recent jumps in cannabis use are among middle-aged adults. Among 35 to 50 year olds in the Michigan panel, daily cannabis use went from 6.6% to 8.5% in a single year, and the panel's 2024 report found use in that age group had doubled or nearly doubled over ten years. Pouches are climbing there too: from 3.3% to 4.9% among 35 to 50 year olds and from 2.2% to 4.3% among 55 to 65 year olds between 2023 and 2024.

New York

New York's own youth tobacco survey shows the same arc as the national numbers, though New York's high school vaping rate is still nearly double the national one.

The 2024 any-tobacco rate is the lowest the state has recorded since 2000. Cigarettes were down to 2.4%, while pouches went from 1.5% to 3.0% since 2022.

In New York City, past-month cannabis use among public high school students fell from 16% in 2015 to 13% in 2023. Among adults, it was 16%, and 19% for 18 to 24 year olds. One number in the city's data runs the other way: emergency department visits involving cannabis among 13 to 17 year olds went from 80.9 per 100,000 in 2016 to 228.7 in 2023. Fewer teens are using, but the ones who end up in the ER are showing up a lot more often. Why they need the ER instead of munchies and a good nap is another question.

Twenty years, three generations

To see how much has changed, go back two decades. A high school senior in 2005 was born around 1987, which makes them a Millennial by Pew Research Center's definition (born 1981 to 1996). Pew starts Gen Z in 1997, so the class of 2015 was roughly the first Gen Z senior class, and the class of 2025 is still Gen Z. The 8th graders in the 2025 survey were born around 2011 and 2012, right on the line. Pew has used 2012 as a tentative end for Gen Z, while McCrindle Research, which coined the name Gen Alpha, starts that generation in 2010. Either way, the first Gen Alpha kids are just now showing up in the 8th grade numbers.

The Millennial senior of 2005 was more likely to have smoked a cigarette in the past month than used cannabis, 23.2% against 19.8%. By 2010, that had flipped. My class, the class of 2011, was born around 1993 and still Millennial. We had 22.6% using cannabis in the past month against 18.7% smoking cigarettes, and our cannabis numbers were the highest in this table on all three measures: 22.6% past month, 36.4% past year and 6.6% daily. Cigarettes were still a daily habit for about one senior in ten, 10.3%. In 2015, roughly the first Gen Z class, daily cannabis passed daily cigarettes for the first time, 6.0% against 5.5%. By 2025, past-month smoking among seniors was 3.4%, about a seventh of what it was in 2005. Past-month cannabis stayed between about 20% and 23% from 2005 through 2015, then dropped. Monitoring the Future didn't start asking about nicotine vaping until 2017, so there's no Millennial number to compare. For Gen Z seniors in 2025 it was 20.0% in the past year.

The young adult numbers run the other way. Monitoring the Future's 19 to 30 year olds in 2005 were born from about 1975 to 1986, mostly Gen X and the oldest Millennials. In 2015 the group was Millennials. In 2025 it's mostly Gen Z.

Gen Z in their twenties use cannabis daily at more than twice the rate of the young adults of 2005, and smoke cigarettes at less than a third the rate. The CDC's adult smoking numbers tell the same story across all ages: 20.9% in 2005, 19.3% in 2010, 15.1% in 2015 and 9.1% in 2025. Among 18 to 24 year olds it fell from 24.4% in 2005 to 13.0% in 2015.

So the generation that came of age as states legalized is smoking the fewest cigarettes on record, and in their twenties they're using cannabis daily at the highest rate Monitoring the Future has recorded for young adults since it started tracking them in 1988.

What this means for the industry

Four takeaways.

First, the adult customer is the story. Past-month marijuana use fell among 12 to 25 year olds and rose among adults 26 and up, and daily use among 35 to 50 year olds climbed to 8.5%. If your marketing, packaging, and store experience are built around a twenty-one-year-old, check who's actually buying.

Second, the young adult market is two markets. The 19 to 22 year old who isn't in college is far more likely to use cannabis every day and to vape nicotine than the one who is. That's a real difference in who walks into a dispensary or a smoke shop.

Third, nicotine is shifting formats. Cigarettes keep falling, vapes and pouches keep growing, and overall nicotine use hasn't dropped with them. Pouches are the fastest-growing nicotine product in these surveys, from high school seniors to adults in their 60s. Anyone in tobacco-adjacent products, grabba included, is operating in that world.

Fourth, the youth numbers are your best argument. When a regulator or a community board says legal weed is hooking kids, these are the surveys to put on the table. I can't tell you legalization causes any of this, and the surveys don't claim it either. One study in JAMA Pediatrics analyzed 1.4 million high school students in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey from 1993 to 2017 and found recreational marijuana laws were associated with an 8% drop in teen use, and a 9% drop in frequent use. That's one study from 2019, and researchers haven't all reached the same answer. What they show is teen cannabis and vaping falling in every federal survey, with Michigan's numbers at the lowest in three decades. The one thing worth watching is the seniors and their pouches.

One caveat on the adult smoking figures. The CDC office that tracked smoking was eliminated last year, and the 2025 number is preliminary CDC data. Treat the decimal points as approximate. The direction is not in question.