YRBS 1991–2023 · Monitoring the Future 1976–2024
In 1997, more than one in three American high schoolers smoked. Today it is one in thirty — the greatest public-health victory in the history of youth surveys. But nicotine didn’t leave the building. It changed its clothes, learned to taste like mango ice, and found the girls first.
CDC YRBS · Monitoring the Future (Univ. of Michigan) · 254,675 (YRBS) + 716,895 (MTF) students · survey-weighted; design-based SEs
In 1997, more than one in three American high schoolers smoked. Today it is one in thirty — the greatest public-health victory in the history of youth surveys. But nicotine didn’t leave the building. It changed its clothes, learned to taste like mango ice, and found the girls first.
The CDC began tracking current cigarette use — at least one cigarette in the past 30 days — in 1991, when the answer was 27.5%. It climbed through the Joe Camel years to a 1997 peak of 36.4%, then began a descent that has never paused: master settlement, indoor-smoking bans, taxes, graphic warnings, and simple social death. By 2023 it reached 3.5%.
E-cigarettes enter the survey in 2015 already at 24% — instantly bigger than smoking. The JUUL spike pushed current vaping to 32.8% in 2019, briefly rivaling smoking’s all-time peak. Flavor restrictions, a purchase age of 21, and the pandemic cut it to about 17% — still roughly five vapers for every smoker. Combine the two products and about one senior-high student in six currently uses nicotine, a level last seen for cigarettes alone around 2009.
Monitoring the Future extends the view to 1976 and asks a broader question — has the student ever smoked a cigarette. Three out of four seniors in 1977 had. The share fell in two long waves: a slow erosion through the 80s and 90s (still 62% as late as 2000), then an accelerating collapse as the millennial and Gen-Z cohorts arrived — 42% by 2010, 24% by 2020, and 14.6% in 2024. Experimentation itself — not just habit — has become rare: a behavior that once defined American adolescence now touches one senior in seven.
Cigarettes were always slightly male: at the 1997 peak, 37.7% of boys smoked against 34.7% of girls. Vaping flipped the sign and widened the gap. In 2023, 19.5% of girls currently vaped against 14.2% of boys — a five-point female lead, unprecedented in half a century of teen nicotine data. Use is broadest among White students (18.6%) but substantial in every group, from 13.4% (other races) to 16.2% (Hispanic) and 14.8% (Black students) — a flatter racial profile than cigarettes ever had.
The optimistic read: even counting every vape, teen nicotine use in 2023 sits at half its 2019 level and a fraction of the 1990s, and the deadliest delivery device in consumer history has been driven nearly to zero among minors. The cautious read: 5% of high schoolers now use nicotine daily through a product two decades too young for anyone to know its late-life bill. The cigarette took fifty years to fall. The question is whether the vape gets the same head start.