Politics
Teen Marijuana Use In Germany Declined Following Recreational Legalization, Government Study Shows
A new study conducted by German federal health officials shows that rates of marijuana use declined among youth after the country legalized adult-use cannabis last year, contradicting one of the more common prohibitionist arguments against the reform.
The Federal Institute for Public Health’s Drug Affinity Study published on Tuesday examined marijuana use trends in 2025, finding that the rate of past-year cannabis consumption for youth aged 12-17 dipped from 6.7 percent to 6.1 percent since the prior survey in 2023. More regular consumption (at least ten times in the past year) also decreased from 1.3 percent to 1.1 percent.
Among young adults between the ages of 18 and 25, the study showed a slight uptick in cannabis usage, with past-year consumption increasing from 23.3 percent to 25.6 percent between 2023 and 2025.
Germany’s former health minister Karl Lauterbach, who spearheaded the government’s legalization plan, said the results of the research “confirm what the goal of legalization was: through the debate about dangers for children and adolescents, their consumption does not increase or even decreases,” according to a translation.
“Nevertheless, the results still need to be confirmed,” he said. “Bans do not deter young people.”
The study is based on surveys of 7,001 adolescents and young adults from April to July of this year.
It was April 2024 when Germany’s legalization law took effect, allowing adults to possess and grow certain amounts of cannabis and social clubs began to open, providing members with legal access to marijuana products.
“Our data show that consumption among adolescents has not increased. However, consumption has risen slightly among young adults, particularly among men between 18 and 25 years of age,” Johannes Nießen, acting director of the Federal Institute for Public Health, said in a press release. “We must monitor this development very closely.”
The lack of evidence that youth use increased post-legalization is consistent with pro-reform arguments. Advocates have long maintained that providing a regulatory framework for marijuana would mitigate underage access as more adults transition to the legal market.
In the U.S., where cannabis is legal in some form in the majority of states but prohibited at the federal level, research has shown similar trends.
For example, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) in July published data that showed youth cannabis consumption has remained stable amid the state legalization movement.
The agency also held a webinar in July in which a Johns Hopkins University researcher acknowledged that while self-reported cannabis consumption by adults has risen as more states have legalized, use by youth has generally remained flat or fallen.
A report from the advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), for example, found that youth marijuana use declined in 19 out of 21 states that legalized adult-use marijuana—with teen cannabis consumption down an average of 35 percent in the earliest states to legalize. The report cited data from a series of national and state-level youth surveys, including the annual Monitoring the Future (MTF) Survey, which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
A Canadian government report separately found that daily or near-daily use rates by both adults and youth have held steady over the last six years after the country enacted legalization.
Back in Germany, following a pivotal national election earlier this year, political parties that were cooperating to form a new coalition government announced that they would be conducting an “open-ended evaluation” of the country’s marijuana legalization law—meaning that at least for now, officials will allow the policy to stay in place.
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In December, the federal minister for food and agriculture signed off on a plan to allow for research-focused commercial marijuana pilot programs to test legal and regulated access to cannabis for consumers.
At the local level, the city of Frankfurt late last year announced plans to move forward with a five-year pilot program that would make cannabis products available to adults more broadly , with the city of Hanford also pursuing a similar plan. A number of other localities have also expressed interest in conducting cannabis sales pilot projects.
Despite widespread concern that results of February’s election could spell doom for the legalization law, most Germans— 59 percent of eligible voters —support allowing adults to purchase cannabis from licensed stores.
For the previous three years Germans were polled on the issue, support sat at just under 50 percent. But as the country’s marijuana law began being implemented last year, there was a spike in favor of the policy change.
Notably, respondents who identified as CDU or CSU—two of the three coalition parties behind the new agreement—were the only political affiliations among which majorities of voters supported rolling back the reform law.
German officials last year convened an international conference where leaders were invited to share their experiences with legalizing and regulating marijuana , with a focus on public health and mitigating the illicit market.
Representatives from Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Switzerland were invited by German Commissioner for Addiction and Drug Issues Burkhard Blienert to the meeting in Berlin.
The countries that participated in the ministerial have varying cannabis policies. Malta, for example, became the first European country to enact cannabis legalization in 2021. Luxembourg followed suit, with the reform officially taking effect in 2023 .
Government officials from several countries, including the U.S., also met in Germany in 2023 to discuss international marijuana policy issues as the host nation worked to enact legalization.
A group of German lawmakers, as well as Blienert, separately visited the US and toured California cannabis businesses in 2022 to inform their country’s approach to legalization.
The visit came after top officials from Germany, Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands held their first-of-its-kind meeting to discuss plans and challenges associated with recreational marijuana legalization in 2022.
