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A University of Michigan study shows that marijuana use is down among high school-aged teens.

Alcohol and cigarette use among middle school and high school students is the lowest it's been since at least 1975, while marijuana use and the use of other illicit drugs have also decreased from 2013 to 2014.

According to the University of Michigan's 40th annual Monitoring the Future study released today - which tracks substance abuse trends among 8th-, 10th- and 12th-grade students nationally - 41 percent of students surveyed said they had used alcohol in the past 12 months and 8 percent admitted to smoking cigarettes over that time period. The 2014 samples are from 41,551 students located in 377 schools.

Those numbers are significant decreases from all-time highs in 1997 when 61 percent of students reported using alcohol and 28 percent admitted to having smoked cigarettes in the past year.

Marijuana use - after five years of increasing among teens - declined slightly in 2014, with use in the prior 12 months declining from 26 percent to 24 percent for the three grades combined.

Daily or near-daily marijuana use - defined as use on 20 or more occasions in the prior 30 days - also declined some in 2014, although about 5.8 percent of high school seniors reported daily or near-daily user. That number is down from 6.5 percent in 2013.

Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator for the survey and a researcher for U-M's Institute for Social Research, said there has been a fairly downward march in the use of all three substances among teens, and that increasing disapproval of smoking has led its sharp decline in use.

"The proportion of teens reporting any alcohol use in the prior year has fallen by about a third (since its peak in 1997, and) the importance of this major decline in smoking for the health and longevity of this generation of young people cannot be overstated," he said in a news release.

Johnston said that the personal disapproval rate of marijuana is down among 8th- and 12th-grade students, and that fewer teens feel like marijuana has will negatively impact them.

"The belief that regular marijuana use harms the user, however, continues to fall among youth, so changes in this belief do not seem to explain the change in use this year, as it has done over most of the life of the study," Johnston said.

The students reported that the availability of marijuana is down significantly since 2013 in the two lower grades, and unchanged in 12th grade, and Johnston said that might explain the slight decrease in use.

Binge drinking had reduced significantly, according to the study. Defined as the consumption of five or more drinks in a row at least once in the two weeks preceding the survey, 12 percent of all the students - and 19 percent of high school seniors - said they had engaged in binge drinking. In 1997, that number was at a high of 22 percent.

Other drugs

The survey also assessed students' use of synthetic drugs such as ecstasy, bath salts, synthetic marijuana, salvia and all other non-LSD drugs.

Synthetic marijuana, also known as K-2 or Spice, was made illegal in Michigan in 2012, but is sold over the counter in gas stations and convenience stores in many states. It contains synthetic chemical components of marijuana sprayed onto shredded plant material that is then smoked.

"Most students still do not recognize synthetic marijuana as a dangerous class of drugs, although the proportion of 12th-graders reporting it as dangerous to use did rise significantly in 2014," Johnston said. "Efforts at the federal and state levels to close down the sale of these substances may be having an effect."

The proportion of 12th-graders reporting use of synthetic marijuana in the prior 12 months has fallen by nearly half. It was 11 percent when first included in the survey in 2011 and was down to 6 percent in 2014.

Bath salts, another class of synthetic drugs sold over-the-counter and of particular concern a few years ago, also have declined in use, with the percentages of students in all three grades now down to less than 1 percent.

"Fortunately, students have come to see these synthetic stimulants as more dangerous, which they are, and that appears to have limited their use," Johnston said.

Ecstasy use showed a statistically significant decline in 2014. For the three grades combined, use in the prior 12 months dropped from 2.8 percent in 2013 to 2.2 percent in 2014. In 2001, the peak year of use, the rate had reached 6 percent.

Students who reported using salvia, another drug used for its hallucinogenic properties, in the prior 12 months also decreased. For example, 5.7 percent of the 12th-graders surveyed in 2009 had used the drug in the previous 12 months, but that number was less than 2 percent in 2014.

Use of hallucinogens other than LSD, which, for the most part involves the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms, is continuing a longer-term decline. Availability of these drugs has been falling since 2001 and continued to decline in 2014.

Narcotic drugs other than heroin--among the most dangerous of the prescription drugs--have been declining in use by 12th-graders since 2009, when 9 percent indicated using them without medical supervision in the prior 12 months.

Their use continued to drop significantly, from 7 percent in 2013 to 6 percent in 2014. Use of these drugs is reported only for 12th grade, and students reported that these drugs are increasingly difficult to obtain.

"In sum, there is a lot of good news in this year's results, but the problems of teen substance use and abuse are still far from going away," Johnston said.

"We see a cyclical pattern in the 40 years of observations made with this study. When things are much improved is when the country is most likely to take its eye off the ball, as happened in the early 1990s, and fail to deter the incoming generation of young people from using drugs, including new drugs that inevitably come along."