More Americans now use cannabis daily than drink or smoke cigarettes daily

SAMHSA released the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on July 28, and the daily-use numbers cross a line that's been coming for a while: 21.4 million Americans over 12 now use marijuana on 20 or more of the last 30 days, ahead of the 19.9 million who smoke cigarettes daily and the 17.2 million who drink alcohol at that frequency.

This isn't a story about overall use — plenty more people drink occasionally than use cannabis occasionally. It's specifically about daily and near-daily habits, the category that tracks most closely with how much of a product an industry actually sells. On that measure, cannabis has now passed both cigarettes and alcohol, and it happened while the plant remains federally illegal outside the medical carve-out.

Nicotine vaping (17.5 million daily users) and smokeless tobacco (4.3 million) round out the picture — cannabis isn't just beating combustible tobacco, it's closing in on the broader nicotine category too. Meanwhile teen use kept declining even as adult daily use climbed, which tracks with what most legal-state data has shown for years: age-gated retail correlates with lower youth access, whatever the federal scheduling debate concludes.

For operators, the takeaway isn't "the market is growing" — unit economics in most mature states say otherwise this year. It's that daily users are the base the whole legal industry is built on, and that base just became measurably larger than the daily-alcohol and daily-cigarette markets it's now outpacing. Beverage and CPG companies watching cannabis from the outside now have a federal data point that's harder to wave off.

The harder number sits next to the celebratory one: SAMHSA's data also puts marijuana use disorder at roughly 19.3 million Americans, the second-largest substance use disorder category behind alcohol's 25.7 million. Volume and public-health risk are rising together, and an industry that wants durable legitimacy has to be able to talk about both in the same breath.