A series of national surveys show that daily marijuana use among U.S. college students is on the rise, surpassing daily cigarette smoking for the first time in 2014, Live Science reported.
Researchers at the University of Michigan found that marijuana use has been growing slowly on the nation's campuses since 2006. Daily or near-daily marijuana use was reported by 5.9 percent of college students in 2014--the highest rate since 1980.
The rate of marijuana use is up from 3.5 percent in 2007. In other words, one in every 17 college students is smoking marijuana on a daily or near-daily basis, defined as use on 20 or more occasions in the prior 30 days.
"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, principal investigator of the study, said in a statement. "And this largely parallels an increase we have been seeing among high school seniors."
Researchers believe Much of this increase may be due to the fact that marijuana use at any level has come to be seen as dangerous by fewer adolescents and young adults, The Wall Street Journal reported. For example, while 55 percent of all 19-to-22-year-old high school graduates saw regular marijuana use as dangerous in 2006, only 35 percent saw it as dangerous by 2014.
The survey also found that the proportion of college students using any illicit drug, including marijuana, in the prior 12 months rose from 34 percent in 2006 to 41 percent in 2013 before falling off some to 39 percent in 2014. That seven-year increase was driven primarily by the increase in marijuana use, though marijuana was not the only drug on the rise.
