Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Back in the Bad Old Days

A few days ago on Twitter, some right-wing "thinker" threw out this idea about Gen Z's decrease in alcohol consumption:

It’s because they’re sitting around by themselves smoking weed. Not a positive shift at all. Society can thrive when there’s lots of social drinking. That’s been proven. But no society of stoners has ever accomplished anything.

 A person named Ryan Burge, research director at an NGO called My Faith Counts, responded with this graph and these words :



So this is demonstrably false. In a survey of high school seniors, in 1976, 64% of them had consumed marijuana in their lifetime. Among seniors from 2022, just 38% have ever consumed marijuana. Alcohol consumption is way down. Cigarette smoking has collapsed, too.

Which is, of course, very interesting. I had no idea that my high school years were the height of teenage bad behavior. 

We were some bad kids! Who knew.


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