Why America Is Switching From Booze to Weed

In the following excerpt, Derek presents his thoughts and questions on the rise of cannabis consumption in the U.S. 

Derek Thompson: I’ve been thinking recently about the end of booze. Total beer consumption recently hit a 21st-century low in America. Many distillers and wine vineyards are reportedly in crisis. And that’s because the share of Americans who report that they drink recently hit a record low going back to the 1930s, according to surveys by Gallup.

Most social changes happen slowly, but the turn against alcohol has been remarkably sudden. The share of Americans who say that a drink or two a day is “bad for their health” has doubled in just the last decade. When I turned 18 in 2004, fewer than 30 percent of Americans under 30 said moderate drinking was bad for their health. Now that number has more than doubled, to 66 percent.

At the same time that booze has fallen in popularity, something else has happened. Something that’s never happened before in American history. Weed, pot, marijuana, cannabis, whatever you want to call it, has officially overtaken alcohol and cigarettes as the nation’s most popular daily drug. This, too, has been a remarkably sudden shift. As recently as the 1990s, the number of Americans who smoked cigarettes or drank every day exceeded the number of daily cannabis users by a factor of 40.

But as the researcher Charles Fain Lehman has written, “2025 is the first time on record that marijuana is the most popular daily-use addictive product.” And what’s so bad about that? you might think. In fact, you might even be inclined to call it progress. Cigarettes are one of the most effective cancer-delivery systems we’ve ever studied. Alcohol abuse and addiction is extremely common. The CDC estimates that cigarettes and excessive alcohol use together account for nearly 700,000 annual deaths. That is almost exactly equivalent to the population of Washington, D.C., where I live.

Ten years ago, it was broadly assumed that the rise of cannabis would replace those harmful addictions with a more harmless habit. In 2014, The New York Times published a six-part series that argued for repealing a marijuana ban. They described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” They quoted cannabis advocates who said marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring health benefits. 

Well, 10 years later, their predictions don’t entirely look accurate. Weed is everywhere now. The number of total and daily users has surged. The number of dispensaries has increased, but so have hospital visits and addiction stories and, in some cases, psychosis. Even the same institutions that called for repealing marijuana laws are now acknowledging that things have maybe gotten out of hand. In February, the New York Times editorial board published an essay announcing that “it’s time for America to admit that it has a marijuana problem.”

And it’s not just The New York Times. After decades of steadily increasing support for legal marijuana, the age of legalization has actually coincided with a mild backlash. Support for cannabis appears to have peaked, and Americans are becoming somewhat more negative about the overall effects of cannabis. Now, I don’t want anybody listening to think that I’m some weed abolitionist here. I’ll be the first to testify that a bit of indica on a Friday or Saturday night, paired with a movie with exceptional cinematography, say a little Roger Deakins, scoop of ice cream, maybe three, I mean, we are talking about heaven on earth here.

But when you legalize a substance or an activity, whether it’s weed or gambling, you equally legalize both its moderate and its excessive outcomes. Today, we are clearly seeing much more frequent use of much more potent cannabis. Frequency of use and potency are easy things to measure when we think about the possibility that America is effectively switching from booze to weed.

But I’m also interested in what’s not so easy to measure, like socialization. Just thinking about my own life, I drink to enjoy myself with other people, and I tend to smoke to enhance the experience of being alone with a movie. Apparently my experience isn’t so unusual. According to Kasey Creswell, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, most alcohol is consumed socially, and it makes us social.

In one study of hers, 720 drinkers were put in groups of strangers and given a cranberry vodka cocktail or a cranberry-flavored placebo. Their social interactions were recorded and systematically coded by researchers. From the abstract, “Alcohol consumption enhanced individual- and group-level behaviors associated with positive affect, reduced individual-level behaviors associated with negative affect, and elevated self-reported bonding.”

In short, alcohol just sort of helps strangers have a good time. Her studies have found that alcohol doesn’t just make people feel loose and happy in a crowd, it increases smiling. According to some studies, it smooths over the gaps in small talk, easing bonding among strangers. Cannabis, by contrast, is more likely to be used in isolation or among smaller groups of friends who are getting high together. If alcohol is a drug for bonding with strangers, cannabis seems more suited for deepening one’s experience with people or movies that you’ve already selected.

At a time when people are socializing less and spending more time alone, I think it’s worth thinking through the fact that each era of American life seems to get the drug it deserves. The highly social mid-century years were typified by cigarettes and booze, which made us wired and lubricated for social gatherings. It is notable and interesting to me that the drug of the moment is a drug more often used for curating a carefully selected experience of interiority rather than giving ourselves over to the uncertainty of strangers.

Today, we have two guests to talk about this age of legal cannabis. Jonathan Caulkins is a drug policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon, and Beau Kilmer is the codirector of RAND Drug Policy Research. Today’s episode is trying to answer a big question, or several big questions. Is America switching from booze to weed? What is gained and lost in that switch? And what is the legalization of cannabis doing to America?

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Jonathan Caulkins and Beau Kilmer
Producer: Victoria Valencia
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman