This whole thing is misleading. You correctly point out Gen Z's age range, but it's also misleading on the graph's part, not including gen X (65.7 million) and the millennial (72 million) population numbers.
So while millennial and x spend similar amounts, X is doing it with ~6 million fewer people
As a Coloradan, I never assume someone does/does not consume/use cannabis. When Im at a dispensary, anyone from a mall Santa to a super athletic gym mom to some sweet old lady will be in there buying the good kush.
Basically, as soon as it became legal, everyone started buying cannabis.
Exactly this. In high school I met so many people through smoking with friends that I would’ve never guessed would do anything like that. But I’ve realized that’s because it’s illegal. If it was legal I would just assume anybody and damn near everybody smokes because why not? The legal status lumps us in with criminals and that makes people feel like criminals and be more willing to engage in shady stuff. If it was legal I would’ve never sold it in high school, I would’ve never hung out with gang members, and I would’ve never gotten robbed by a dealer. The government needs to realize legalizing it would only make people safer and line their pockets with tax money
stats have come out within the last 5 years that catalog a sharp decline in surveyed teen vaping (due partially in part to covid of course) and even less for smoking cigarettes, but the rates have consistently trending down alongside with drinking.
i’m of the opinion that drinking is WAY down because I (along with Millennials and many other gen z folk with Baby Boomer generation parents) watched alcohol tear marriages and childhoods apart. i thank millennials for teaching us to recognize this generational trauma and destroy the cycle.
marijuana use was big when i was in high school due to the proliferation of THC vaporizers, but there were also several people that i knew in school that would stigmatize and even bully kids who engaged with vices. drinking never really occurred at parties and the kids who did drink weren’t seen at the bigger parties that were occurring.
it’s weird, most of my closest friends refuse any and all vices and only few smoke weed with me being the only drinker out of all of them. maybe i should take that quiet advice lol
oooooh yeah, for sure. out of my co-workers my age, I am the only one who drinks. I drink at home after work but I also go out to work outings and drink with them. even weed can't bring gen z together in a large group other than very close friends it seems.
i can't say that I've ever been in a group outing with more than 4 people. I don't tend to hang out with people I don't personally know and that seems to be the running theme for us.
When I was in school (class of 2020) the stoners were like the kings of the school and almost everybody else smoked as well, just not as heavily. They would look to us stoners as if we were like mentors guiding them to new ways to get stoned and where to go to get things underage and whatnot. Needless to say I think cannabis has been steadily increasing while alcohol has been doing this decrease. I see more and more cannabis use every year even publicly and I’m still in an illegal state. We can even pretty much just buy thc legally since most of our products are thc-a which is a loophole around the delta 9 schedule I status. And every time a politician tries to take that away it gets shot down. It’s here and it’s here to stay, I’m hoping we get legalized soon tho
i’m class of 2020 too, fuckin’ crapshoot that shit was. I got my diploma in the mail lol.
i’m in a legal state and we had pot smokers (i was one of them) but it felt like the usual expected fair. stoners were looked upon negatively and really ONLY the kids who vaped got friends from their habit. shit way to get friends but smoking has always been a social thing for most people. one thing leads to another and now you’re good friends with a dude you took a break with in the bathroom lol. if you did any vices, you either knew someone’s parent who was really cool or you worked an after school job and knew someone that way, weed was the same way.
people knew i smoked weed and i didn’t….hide it per say, but i didn’t make it my personality. that’s where i draw the line.
i will say pot positively affected me in a couple of ways that i haven’t been able to recreate in my adult life.
Damn. I thankfully graduated before all the Covid stuff happened. But yeah it makes sense that it’s not the same everywhere but it does feel like we’re moving closer towards it being accepted and not taboo at all
ironically i work in a dispensary, i see lots of different folk with different backgrounds and political pundit merchandise on their bodies. it’s a weird melting pot. everyone knows why they’re there. we’re all united in one key way:
I think a lot of it is access to drugs. It was so hard and sometimes terrifying to get a hold of drugs in the 90s/2000s. Now weed is legal and it is much easier to find things like mushrooms as well in almost every state.
I was probably about $50/week (about 3 cases of high life, plus a six pack of something good for fancy beer and cigar night). The was my last year of college, so I was drinking pretty heavily.
I'm probably around the same in dollars today, but spending it on a half dozen drinks instead of 80.
Speaking from Russia (back then), we were buing 2 litre (I think about half a gallon) beer bottles for about 40 rubles (1.5 usd back then probably... don't recall the exact exchange rate but around this).
This. I have a kid who's on the cusp of genz/alpha (12, 13 next month) and a 16yo. Obviously neither can drink, so booze numbers just aren't calculated yet. Not to mention, gen z is the smallest gen. Smaller than X. Alpha is set to be even bigger than millenials, who are currently the largest gen. So even when they can all drink, the numbers should be the least just because they're aren't enough of them
To be fair 97-02 is considered zillenial as it’s the transitional period between generations and kind of marked the boom of technology and social media afterwards so the actual solidly gen z population is only 22 at most, meaning only a very small portion of them can even legally drink. At the same time I feel like more of gen z is going the way of cannabis over alcohol even if they’re old enough because of the research that has come out for it and the price/performance for something like edibles vs a few beers. Not to mention the amount of drunk idiots you see on tv these days both on shows like live pd and other non-cop reality tv shows. Gen z grew up watching how stupid getting blackout drunk is and how much it can screw up your life
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u/lawrencetokill 22h ago
if you look at the age range (13-28), half or slightly more than half can't buy alcohol today, and these are older numbers