According to new state statistics, despite the concerns of opponents to marijuana legalization who claimed that the policy would result in a skyrocketing usage by teenagers, the consumption of cannabis by Minnesota’s middle school and high-school students is now lower than ever over the last decade.
The Minnesota Student Survey is conducted three times a year amongst students from grades 5 through 9.
Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill that will legalize marijuana in Minnesota for adults aged over 21 in 2023. The latest version of this survey is therefore the first since cannabis was made available to all adults.
Officials from the state said that new data showed “healthier trends” in relation to students’ use of cannabis and their perceptions about its harms.
From 2013 to 2025, there has been a drop of 57.7 % in the self-reported cannabis use during the past year among students from 8th through 11th grades combined. The use of cannabis in the past month has decreased over time.
In a report on the findings, it is stated that: “The overall self-reported marijuana use of students in Minnesota continued to drop each year from 2013”
The Department of Health reported that more students now consider marijuana use once or twice per week to be moderately harmful to extremely harmful. “This trend has reversed from 2013 until 2022,” it said.
Intriguingly, the respondents to the survey vastly overestimated their peers’ marijuana use.
In 2025, students in 8th and 9th grades reported that they believed over half their peers (54%) used cannabis. However, the fact sheet reports that 92% reported having never used cannabis.
Officials from the state said that even though overall the use of marijuana by minors has decreased since the legalization period, there is one result in particular that stands out.
“Despite positive trends, the student survey—indicates that some of our children are encountering cannabis at young ages,” Brooke Cunningham, Minnesota’s commissioner of health, said. The commissioner of health in Minnesota, Brooke Cunningham said that we need to speak to our kids about cannabis prior to them experimenting with it. We know how damaging early marijuana use is to the developing brains, their mental health and their future.
Minnesota’s survey, which shows that marijuana legalization did not lead to an increase in teenage use of the drug is in line with previous studies conducted in other states as well as at the federal level.
The report also supports reform advocates who believe that the creation of a cannabis regulatory framework where licensed retailers check IDs, and other security measures are implemented to prevent illegal diversion will be more effective than prohibition. It is better for consumers and businesses alike.
A recent study funded by the federal government in Canada showed that marijuana usage rates among youths declined once Canada legalized cannabis.
German officials also released an independent report that examined the country’s experiences with marijuana legalization. It showed that opposition fears about traffic safety, youth use and many other concerns have been largely disproven.
Last year, U.S. federal health data also indicated that while past-year marijuana use overall has climbed in recent years, the rise has been “driven by increases…among adults 26 years or older.” In contrast, among younger Americans the rate of cannabis abuse disorder and past-year usage “remained constant between 2021 and 2020.”
In the U.S. research shows that the use of marijuana by teenagers has fallen across all states where the drug is made legal for adults.
A report from the advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), for example, found that youth marijuana use declined in 19 out of 21 states that legalized adult-use marijuana—with teen cannabis consumption down an average of 35 percent in the earliest states to legalize.
Another survey from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also showed a decline in the proportion of high-school students reporting past-month marijuana use over the past decade, as dozens of states moved to legalize cannabis.
Another U.S. study reported a “significant decrease” in youth marijuana use from 2011 to 2021—a period in which more than a dozen states legalized marijuana for adults—detailing lower rates of both lifetime and past-month use by high-school students nationwide.
Another federal report concluded that cannabis consumption among minors—defined as people 12 to 20 years of age—fell slightly between 2022 and 2023.
Separately, a research letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2024 said there’s no evidence that states’ adoption of laws to legalize and regulate marijuana for adults have led to an increase in youth use of cannabis.
According to a similar JAMA study, neither the legalization of cannabis nor opening retail stores increased youth use.
In 2023, meanwhile, a U.S. health official said that teen marijuana use has not increased “even as state legalization has proliferated across the country.”
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