Tobacco, alcohol and cannabis consumption among 16-year-olds has drastically decreased in France over the last decade, as has been the case among young Europeans, according to the French Observatory for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT), which is presenting the results of a European survey conducted in 2024 on Thursday.
France is "now below the European average for all indicators of use" of drugs, tobacco and alcohol by 16-year-olds, according to the European survey on the consumption of addictive substances conducted every four years in 37 countries on the continent.
The decline observed between 2015 and 2024 is "significant" in many European countries and "particularly marked in France," underlines the OFDT.
More than 113,000 young Europeans aged 16 were surveyed, including 3,376 French people, for this latest edition.
In 2024, 20% of 16-year-old French people had already tried tobacco, which is "one of the lowest levels in Europe," reports the OFDT: "In ten years, the proportion of 16-year-old adolescents smoking cigarettes every day has been divided by five," falling from 16% in 2015 to 3.1% in 2024, reaching the levels of the Nordic countries.
This "sharp decline," observed in "almost all" Western European countries, reflects effective control policies, notably the increase in tobacco prices, analyses the OFDT.
Experimentation with cannabis by French adolescents is also experiencing a "spectacular" decline: it has been divided by three in ten years, while young French people were among the biggest consumers in Europe in 2015. Around 8.4% of 16-year-olds had already consumed it in 2024, compared to 31% in 2015.
To explain this decline, the OFDT points to the progressive "denormalization" of smoking "which, given the intertwining of the two products, probably also favors a denormalization of cannabis among the younger generations."
Seven out of 10 French teenagers had tried alcohol by 2024, a level that remains "high," even though "France is among the third of European countries with the lowest consumption of alcoholic beverages," the study also indicates.
The frequency of "heavy occasional drinking" also remains high, both in France (22%) and in half of the countries participating in the study (30%).
Other illicit drugs also attract much less young people: in 2024, 3.9% had tried them in France, compared to 7.5% in 2015, a figure below the European average (5%).
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