CDC Finds Frequent Social Media Use Tied to Teen Drinking and Drug Use

High school students who use social media several times a day were roughly twice as likely as their peers to report current alcohol use and marijuana use, and about 2.5 times as likely to report binge drinking, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis published Oct. 25 in Public Health Reports. The study drew on the 2023 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which sampled 20,103 students in grades 9 through 12.

Frequent use was defined broadly — scrolling several times a day, about once an hour, or more than once an hour. Students below that threshold, including those who used no social media at all, formed the comparison group.

The numbers, with their error bars

After adjusting for race, ethnicity and grade, frequent social media use was associated with current tobacco or nicotine use at a prevalence ratio of 1.88 (95 percent confidence interval, 1.25 to 2.83). Current alcohol use came in at 2.07 (1.54 to 2.78), current binge drinking at 2.55 (1.45 to 4.48), and ever having used marijuana at 2.09 (1.68 to 2.60).

Those intervals matter. The binge-drinking estimate is the largest point estimate in the paper and also the least precise: the true value could plausibly sit as low as 1.45 or as high as 4.48. The tobacco and alcohol estimates are tighter, and the marijuana result is the most stable of the four. The analysis also tested for ever misusing a prescription opioid and for ever using an illicit drug, but the associations reported in the published abstract are the four above.

The pattern held among both female and male students, which the authors treat as a consistency check rather than a separate finding. The published methods describe adjustment for race, ethnicity and grade only, so differences tied to income or school context are not accounted for in these estimates.

What a prevalence ratio can and cannot say

The survey is a single snapshot taken across one school year. It cannot show whether heavy social media use preceded drinking or followed it, and it cannot separate social media from everything correlated with it — household stress, peer norms, existing mental health conditions, or the simple fact that adolescents who are already experimenting may spend more time online.

The authors say as much in the paper's conclusion, calling for work on mechanisms: which platforms matter, what substance-related content students actually encounter, and how peer influence travels through those feeds. Until that research exists, the finding is best read as a signal about where to look rather than a causal claim about what to restrict.

That distinction has practical consequences. Lawmakers in several states have moved to require age verification or parental consent for social platforms, and school districts have restricted phone use during the school day. This analysis gives those efforts a number to cite, but nothing in it establishes that removing a phone would reduce drinking.

Why the pairing of these two subjects is not incidental

Adolescent substance use and adolescent mental health have converged in federal surveillance data for years. The same survey that produced this analysis has documented rising depressive symptoms and, in more recent waves, some improvement in several substance use measures. Social media sits at the intersection, which is why the study's authors — most of them in the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health, with two co-authors from the Division of Overdose Prevention — framed the work as a prevention question.

For clinicians, the finding argues for asking about screen use alongside the standard screening questions, particularly with patients who present for mental health concerns or who screen positive for substance use disorder. Screening alone does not change outcomes; it matters when it connects to care. Adolescents who need treatment face a separate access problem, since medication-assisted treatment remains scarce for patients under 26 even as overdose deaths in that group rose.

The limits the authors list

The data are self-reported, collected in classrooms, and subject to the usual underreporting of stigmatized behavior. The 2023 cycle is the most recent national Youth Risk Behavior Survey available, and the analysis is cross-sectional, so the ordering of events cannot be recovered from it at all.

What the paper does establish is narrower and still useful: in a nationally representative sample of American high school students, frequent social media use and several forms of substance use travel together closely enough to be worth tracking as one public health question rather than two.