Millennials’ Sobriety Isn’t What It Seems
By: Zoe Cormier
Tags: Millennials, Data, Social Media, Drugs, Psychology

Richard Miech, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and leader of a National Institute for Drug Abuse-funded project called Monitoring the Future, says — based purely on the numbers, gathered from more than 40,000 8th, 10th, and 12th graders annually since 1972 — that yes, illicit drug use is on the decline. “Look at cigarettes and alcohol — the substances that were traditionally most commonly used. Millennials have very little levels of use compared to other cohorts,” he says.



Even where I live, in the United Kingdom — nicknamed “Booze Britain” by its own citizens — a report from the Office for National Statistics states that people 16 to 24 years old “are less likely to drink than any other age group.”

While marijuana is being legalized or decriminalized across the US, Canada, and Europe — usage is “stabilizing,” says Silvia Martins, associate professor of epidemiology of Columbia University, who has published more than 130 academic studies on substance use.

Overall, the trend toward less dabbling in drugs and alcohol among millennials “is definitely real,” Martins says. Nonetheless, Sion Kim Harris, co-director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research, offers a caveat. Although teenagers appear to be getting wasted less often, Harris cautions that many of them are just making up for it in their 20s. “We are certainly seeing declines in substance use in those under 18 — but in the 18 to 25 group, those rates are not going down. If anything, they are going up,” Harris says. “The college environment is still very wet.” (Read: boozy.)



But if today’s teens really are more likely to lay off the hooch, cigs, and drugs, the ultimate question is: Why? Nobody knows yet. “I don’t know of any paper that has been published yet on the actual reason for this, because it’s just such a new phenomenon — it’s only been trending for a few years,” says Harris.



However, there are some compelling hypotheses. And each one carries troubling implications.

One: Selfie Obsession

The story goes like this: Kids raised on a steady diet of social media now live in mortal fear of looking less than stellar on Facebook or Instagram. If you grow up with the Internet from the moment you can speak, it’s probably natural to think of your online identity as being intrinsically tied to your true identity. Based on what we can see online, there are certainly far more images of youngsters looking pristine, and far fewer pics of them that resemble the sweaty ravers and wide-eyed hippies of bygone eras.

This also feels like part of a shift in political identity: San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury kids in the ’60s took pride in reclaiming the word “freak,” turning it from an ostracizing put-down to a celebratory title. Ravers in the UK in the ’80s and ’90s threw blow-out illegal parties thousands strong, gorging on ecstasy in a riotous love-fest, which they saw as a communal, defiant response to Margaret Thatcher’s cynical statement that “there’s no such thing as society.” A decade later British “ladettes” saw being able to match the boys pint-for-pint as a badge of honor. In a sense, it was a feminist statement: Whatever you can do, we can do just as well (or better), including boozing; let “lady-like” temperance become an outdated relic. Today, it’s hard to find a scene for the young so raucous — or so fun. Kids today just don’t seem to find the same rebellious joy in being altered in public.

Two: Academic Pressure

It’s fairly clear that the children of affluent families today have far greater workloads piled on them than in the ’60s or the ’80s. Now that a bachelor’s degree no longer guarantees an actual job, you’d better plan for further education. In this education arms race, where is there time to get high (and recover)? That would also explain the relative popularity of a concentration-enhancing drug like Adderall, a pharmaceutical that is utilitarian rather than euphoria-inducing.

Three: Depression and Anxiety

Even while there seems to be more pressure on youth now to excel academically, they’re also expected to appear happy and healthy. That would explain that while they may be drinking less, smoking less, and taking fewer psychedelics and stimulants. A study from Drugabuse.com (an addiction-information resource) states that “prescription painkiller abuse is more common among millennials than any generation before.” That means kids are still using drugs; they’re just using them to numb pain rather than have fun. Research from Canada and documented in the Toronto Star describes demands for mental health services for university students as “exploding,” exacerbated by a dearth of funds and awareness. “There is a perception that this age group is healthy,” the president of the Ontario University and College Health Association told the newspaper, “but they’re not.”



Four: Technology Addiction

A variety of brain-imaging studies have suggested that people addicted to self-destructive habits of a non-chemical nature — such as gambling, video games, porn, shopping, or the Internet itself — get the same “hit” of the rewarding neurotransmitter dopamine that biological treats such as drugs, sex, and sugar provide. Evidence for this “dopamine hit” remains inconclusive, but there has been a clear rise in the use of interactive technologies in teens alongside an apparent decrease in illegal drug use. Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University studies how “screenagers” and “digital natives” over the past two decades have increasingly spent time playing video games and jabbing smartphones while at the same time committing fewer crimes (such as being arrested for drug offenses). “It makes pure sense that if you spend eight hours a day in front of a screen, that detracts from your time spent out being able to buy drugs,” he says.



Five: Cocooning

Most of us — from children to adolescents to parents and grandparents — now can spend most of our time at home, doing nearly everything that once brought us into the wider world: grocery shopping, watching movies, communicating with friends, and so on. If teens don’t need to leave the house to interact with friends, surely there will be fewer opportunities to run into the neighborhood bad boys? To cap that off, parents are less keen to tell their kids to “go outside and play” after the 1990s panic over child abduction.