College students would rather smoke pot than cigarettes

Man smoking a joint.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Today's college students prefer lighting up a joint to sparking up a cigarette, a new study released Tuesday revealed. The number of U.S. university students using pot a on near-daily basis has reached a 35-year high, supplanting cigarettes as the most popular smokeable substance.

Nearly six percent of college students smoke pot "either every day or at least 20 times in the previous 30 days," A 2014 University of Michigan survey of full-time college students found.

But, parents, your kids still aren't as big potheads as you were back in the day. While the latest pot-smoking stats are dramatically up from just four years ago in 2007, when just 3.5 percent of students reported using pot on a near-daily basis, kids today still haven't reached the 7.2 percent high of 1980.

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Meanwhile, cigarette smoking's popularity has seen a drop that's more dramatic than marijuana's rise. While 19 percent of college students identified as "heavy cigarette smokers" back in 1999, only 5 percent of students do now.

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