Today's teens are way less rebellious than they used to be

American teenagers are increasingly unlikely to drink, smoke, or use illicit drugs, finds this year's edition of the University of Michigan's annual Monitoring the Future (MTF) Study, which was released Wednesday. The survey, which focuses on students in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades, shows a longstanding decline in cigarette and alcohol use, which continued in 2015.

Drug use is generally on the decline, too. Heroin use among teens dipped from 1 percent to 0.5 percent since 1975. Marijuana use has risen a bit since the early 1990s — one in five high school seniors currently say they've consumed cannabis in the last month — but that still marks a decline from the late 1970s, when that figure topped one in three.

Teen pot use has also declined since 2012, when recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado and Washington, a fact Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post argues is a significant blow to drug war advocates' arguments about the risks of legalization.

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