American teenagers used to drink, smoke, and bring weapons to school. Then they mostly stopped.
The improvement arrived without anyone solving it, and almost no one noticed.
Experimental History · The Decline of Deviance 2In 1995, an ordinary American high school looked a little wild.
In a typical classroom that year, one out of two teenagers drank, more than one in three smoked cigarettes, and two in five had sampled cannabis. One student in ten said they had once carried a weapon onto campus. Roughly one in sixteen girls ages 15 to 19 was expecting a child. Crime across the country was about as high as anyone had recorded.
Over the next 30 years, those troubles eased and some nearly disappeared.
The strange part is how little credit anyone can claim. The author argues the gains came as a byproduct of rising prosperity, not a plan. We spent heavily on antidrug efforts, yet the author writes, "We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking," and trying to persuade them sometimes made them smoke more. The improvement arrived without design, and hardly anyone noticed.
Questions people ask
How low are teen drinking and smoking now?
Much lower than in 1995. Federal youth surveys show current drinking among high schoolers has fallen by more than half since the 1990s, and monthly cigarette smoking, once reported by about one in three students, is now in the low single digits. Vaping rose for a time, but cigarettes have largely vanished from high schools.
What happened with teen pregnancy and crime?
Both fell sharply. The U.S. teen birth rate, which was around 60 births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 in the mid-1990s, is now roughly one quarter of that level. Violent crime also dropped substantially from its early-1990s peak and, despite recent ups and downs, remains far below that high.
Does that mean kids today have no problems?
No, the worries have shifted. Parents, doctors, and researchers now focus more on sadness and anxiety, heavy phone and social media use, and whether children play outside and socialize enough in person. In other words, the concern moved from what teenagers were doing too much of to what some fear they are doing too little of.