It’s no secret that alcohol is hard on your stomach, liver, and kidneys—and can cause alcohol poisoning or death if you consume too much. Many cannabis users stick to smoking or vaping strictly for these reasons. Millennials, who make up the largest group of all recreational cannabis users[xviii]— prefer cannabis to booze[xix]. And according to a survey from the Monitoring the Future Study, millennials drink far less alcohol than generations.
But, according to Britta Starke, an addictions therapist and the program director of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center at the University of North Carolina, Millennials are well known for ingesting other substances.
“It still seems like this is a generation of self-medicating, but they’re using things differently,” says Starke, and the normalization and ever more common legalization of cannabis have a big part in that.
Moreover, a recent study, from 2017, suggests that legal cannabis has a dramatic effect on alcohol sales.[xx]
It found that in counties with legalized medicinal cannabis, alcohol sales dropped more than 12 percent when compared with similar counties without weed.
The study also found that recreational legalization has the potential to bolster that effect by making cannabis products even more broadly accessible.
And while legal marijuana are piecemeal in the U.S., Pew Research Center polling found that more than two thirds of Americans favor legalized recreational pot.[xxi]
Just as importantly, Pew found that the share of U.S. adults who oppose legalization has fallen from 52% in 2010 to 32% today. Pew’s polling took place about a year ago in September 2019.[xxii]
