[caption id=”attachment_122969″ align=”aligncenter” width=”5184″](AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)
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One in every 17 college students is smoking marijuana on a daily or near-daily basis according to a recent study.
Daily marijuana use among college students is currently at a 35-year high, and far fewer students view the drug as dangerous, according to the University of Michigan’s annual Monitoring the Future study.
5.9 percent of students said they use marijuana daily, which is the highest percentage of daily usage recorded in the survey since 1980. 2014 was also the first year in which regular marijuana smoking exceeded regular cigarette smoking among college students.
“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 news release. “And this largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high school seniors.”
More students may be smoking marijuana now because fewer view it as a “dangerous” activity.
The study showed that only 35 percent of 19- to 22-year-olds surveyed in 2014 viewed regular marijuana use as dangerous, whereas in 2006, 55 percent of young adults considered regular use of the drug to be dangerous.
While marijuana use is up among college students, alcohol use has gone down.
In 2014, 63 percent of college students reported having an alcoholic beverage in the past 30 days, down from 82 percent in 1981. The rate of binge drinking – defined as having five or more drinks in a row – declined 9 percentage points between 1980 and 2014, from 44 percent down to 35 percent.
Cigarette smoking has also continued to decline among college students. Only 5 percent reported smoking cigarettes on a daily basis.
The Monitoring the Future study measures drug, alcohol and cigarette use and the attitude toward each among students nationwide. The study is conducted annually by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of Health.
