More Americans Now Smoke Weed Daily Than Drink Daily, and Addiction Rates Are Climbing With It

Marijuana just passed a milestone nobody in the industry likes to talk about. According to the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 21.4 million Americans now use marijuana daily or near-daily. That's more than the 19.9 million daily cigarette smokers and more than the 17.2 million daily drinkers, according to Fox News' reporting on the SAMHSA data.

Daily or near-daily use is defined as consuming marijuana on 300 or more days in the past year. That number jumped 21% between 2022 and 2025, from 17.7 million to 21.4 million users, according to SAMHSA. The single biggest jump happened between 2021 and 2022, when 2.8 million people added the habit.

This isn't a teenager problem. It's an adult problem. Adults 18 and older using marijuana daily or near-daily rose 22% between 2021 and 2025, going from 17.2 million to 20.9 million, per the SAMHSA data cited by Fox News. Adults 26 and older are driving the trend, not kids.

Alcohol still wins on overall reach. About 129 million people drank in the past month compared to 43.8 million who used cannabis, according to the same survey. But general marijuana use climbed from 13.2% to 15.1% of the population between 2021 and 2025, while cigarette use kept falling, dropping from 20.1% to 15.9% over the same stretch.

The addiction numbers back up the concern

A study published in JAMA Psychiatry, led by Nora Volkow, MD, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, tracked more than 180,000 participants and found cannabis use disorder rising sharply among adults from 2021 to 2024.

Among men, past-year CUD prevalence rose from 7.3% to 9.3%. Among women, it rose from 4.5% to 5.6%, according to the study reported by MedPage Today. Moderate-to-severe CUD, the more serious clinical tier, also climbed, hitting men 35 and older and women across almost every adult age bracket.

Volkow told MedPage Today the findings were "pretty shocking," directly contradicting the popular narrative that weed is a "safe drug." She said the epidemiology shows "a much higher percentage of people that get exposed to cannabis are becoming addicted to it" than people assume.

Meanwhile alcohol use disorder held basically flat. Moderate-to-severe AUD prevalence stayed stable for women across every subgroup and for men except a decline among those 21 to 34, per the JAMA Psychiatry data.

Among adults 18 to 20 in 2024, cannabis use disorder prevalence (14.5% to 14.9%) actually exceeded alcohol use disorder (10.3% to 10.4%), even though more of them drink than smoke weed. Jack Wilson, PhD, of the Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of Sydney, told MedPage Today this reflects both safer drinking patterns among young people and cannabis becoming more available in "diverse and potent products."

How you use it matters

A study out of NYU Langone Health, published August 8 in Addictive Behaviors and reported by PR Newswire and News-Medical, adds another wrinkle. Researchers led by Omar El-Shahawy, MD, PhD, found 48% of adult cannabis users mainly smoke it, 21% smoke and vape, 17% mainly use edibles, and 14%, the "polymodal" group, use nearly every method available.

That polymodal group is where the real trouble concentrates. About 67% of them meet criteria for cannabis use disorder, compared to 36% of smokers, 47% of smoker-vapers, and just 15% of edible users. Half of polymodal users consume cannabis daily.

El-Shahawy said the pattern is a clinical red flag: "Asking patients not only whether but how they use cannabis could help clinicians identify when a fuller assessment may be warranted." He noted the study, which drew on 2022-2023 survey data from 17,732 adults, didn't examine why people choose particular methods, so the reasons behind the clustering remain unclear.

The policy backdrop

None of this is happening in a vacuum. President Trump moved to reclassify state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, a shift that cuts taxes for dispensaries and eases research barriers, according to reporting from the Associated Press carried by Breitbart. Cannabis attorney Jesse Alderman told the AP the move signals the administration "means business on getting this done," with a further hearing that could extend similar treatment to recreational markets.

That's a defensible position for people who point to decades of prohibition doing little to stop use while blocking legitimate medical research. Longtime Seattle defense attorney Douglas Hiatt told the AP that federal recognition of cannabis's medical value, decades after AIDS patients relied on it to keep down medication, was overdue.

But loosening federal restrictions while addiction diagnoses climb creates a genuine tension nobody in Washington has resolved. The industry's own marketing leans hard on "safer than alcohol." The federal government's own top addiction researcher says the data no longer supports treating that as settled fact.

On the overdose side, there's real good news. The CDC's August 12 update showed predicted drug overdose deaths fell 12.3% for the 12 months ending March 2026, down to an estimated 67,798 from 77,306 the year before, according to the Epoch Times. But AMA President Bobby Mukkamala, in a statement cited by the Epoch Times, warned that rising cannabis use disorder and polysubstance use mean "the overdose epidemic is evolving in dangerous ways," even as the raw death toll drops.

The open question is whether federal drug policy, currently moving toward looser cannabis regulation, will pair that shift with the funding and clinical infrastructure Volkow's data suggests is now urgently needed.