Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2022: Overview, Key Findings on Adolescent Drug Use

Monitoring the Future (MTF) has become one of the nation's most relied upon scientific sources of valid information on trends in use of licit and illicit psychoactive drugs by U.S. adolescents, college students, young adults, and adults up to age 60. During the last four decades, the study has tracked and reported on the use of an ever-growing array of such substances in these populations of adolescents and adults. The annual MTF series of monographs is one of the primary mechanisms through which the new epidemiological findings are reported. Findings from the inception of the study in 1975 through 2022 are included--the results of 48 national in-school surveys and 46 national follow up surveys. MTF has conducted in-school surveys of nationally representative samples of: (1) 12th grade students each year since 1975; and (2) 8th and 10th grade students each year since 1991. In addition, beginning with the class of 1976, the study has conducted follow up surveys of representative subsamples of the respondents from each previously participating 12th grade class. These follow up surveys now continue well into adulthood, currently up to age 60. MTF is designed to detect age, period, and cohort effects in substance use and related attitudes. Age effects are similar changes at similar ages seen across multiple class cohorts; they are common during adolescence. Period effects are changes that are parallel over a number of years across multiple age groups (in this case, all three grades under study--8, 10, and 12). Cohort effects are substance use behaviors or attitudes that distinguish a class cohort from others that came before or after them and are maintained as the cohort ages. The survey results divide cleanly into the time periods before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. All surveys in 2020 were completed before March 15, when data collection was halted due to pandemic concerns. Consequently, results from 2020 and previous years are pre-pandemic, while results from 2021 and 2022 took place after the onset of the pandemic and the associated national response. [For "Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2021: Overview, Key Findings on Adolescent Drug Use," see ED618240.]