The number of straight edge or teetotal high school students has jumped dramatically over the past 50 years.
The data comes from Monitoring the Future and suggests that teenage hedonism is on the decline.
While high school students have typically been associated with underaged drinking, smoking behind the bike sheds, and even engaging in early experimentations with narcotics, it seems the kids of today are losing interest in such pursuits.
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The data was brought to many people’s attention by researcher Ryan Burge on X, who said that just 5% of teenagers identified as straight edge in 1976.
"No alcohol, no cigarettes, no marijuana in the prior month," he said.
As of 2021, that figure had jumped to 40%.
Monitoring the Future also conducted a survey in 2023 that found illicit drug use among US teenagers had remained steady since the lows reported through 2020 and 2021.
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10.9% of eighth graders (that’s Year 9 in the UK), 19.8% of 10th graders (Year 11) and 31.2% of 12th graders (Year 13) reported drug use.
A third of 17 to 18-year-olds taking drugs isn’t an insignificant figure, of course, but it’s still representative of a decline in risk-taking behaviours among the young.
The BBC said in 2022 that Gen Z is more health-conscious than Millennials, and it seems generational differences are pretty stark where alcohol, cigarettes and drugs are concerned.
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"[The decrease in alcohol consumption is] certainly not happening because of alcohol policy, because all risky practices are going down – drug use, unprotected sex, risky behaviours [like smoking, crime and driving hazardously] – young people are more risk averse in general," said Amy Pennay, senior research fellow at the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
"The way Gen Zers budget and save is so different from previous generations, because they can’t just bust into the housing market.
"Therefore, some see alcohol as an overpriced commodity that obfuscates the bigger picture."
In the UK, childhood exposure to the darker side of British alcohol culture may have turned younger Brits off the stuff.
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John Holmes, professor of alcohol policy at the University of Sheffield in the UK, said: "In the mid to late 2000s, getting drunk and binge drinking was a way friendships were formed and solidified – even experiencing the negative effects together was a key part of making and sustaining friends in adolescence and early adulthood.
"But Gen Zers are more likely to see drunkenness as unpleasant, uncool or uninteresting."
This is reflected by a similar decline in the US, however, with data from Gallup finding that the rate of overdrinking among 18 to 34-year-olds was down to 13% from 21% from between 2001 and 2003.
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More broadly, 62% of adults say they drink alcohol compared with the 72% of 20 years ago.
Could our love affair with booze finally be coming to an end? If that’s the case, we’re still a long way from a teetotal society.
Rachael Davis