Dr. Siegel’s Marijuana Math Doesn’t Add Up
On October 29, Fox News ran a column by Dr. Marc Siegel, the network’s senior medical analyst, under a headline about America’s awful marijuana addiction spreading from parents to kids. His opening line sets the tone: marijuana is becoming the new alcohol, “or worse,” and children are paying the price.
I wanted to be fair to this one, so I read it twice. Parts of it are true. The problem is what he does with the true parts. He takes a real finding about what happens inside some households and uses it to paint a picture of what is happening to American children as a whole. Those are different questions with different answers, and the second answer runs the opposite way from his thesis.
Let me give the column its due, because a rebuttal that ignores the strong points is just another narrative.
Parental use really is up. The University of California San Diego study Siegel leans on, published in Addictive Behaviors, analyzed National Survey on Drug Use and Health data and estimated that at least 5.9 million American children lived with a parent who used cannabis on most days in 2024. By then, 8% of parents used most days, 5.2% daily, and 6.7% met the criteria for cannabis use disorder. Daily use among parents was about four times as common as daily drinking. That is a real shift, and it deserves attention.
Potency is also up. Flower today commonly tests far above the cannabis of the 1970s, and concentrates are in another league.
And there is one place where legalization has demonstrably hurt kids: toddlers eating edibles. In U.S. poison center data, pediatric edible exposures among children under six climbed from 207 cases in 2017 to 3,054 in 2021. In Ontario, emergency visits for cannabis poisoning in children under ten rose ninefold after commercial edibles became legal, with about a third of those visits requiring hospitalization. If you keep gummies in a house with a four-year-old, lock them up. That is not nanny-state advice. It is the same logic as medicine cabinets.
None of this is made up. So where does the column go wrong?
Siegel writes that children are twice as likely to use cannabis themselves if a parent is a regular user, citing NSDUH. That may be accurate. It answers the question: among kids in households with a regular-using parent, how many use? It does not answer the question that matters for his thesis, which is whether kids as a group are using more.
They are not. They are using less.
Consider what the data says nationally. Government survey figures show that between 2014 and 2023, the share of 12-to-17-year-olds who had ever tried marijuana fell 18%, past-year use fell 15%, and current use fell 19%. The newest NSDUH numbers, reported through NORML’s summary of the SAMHSA release, show teen past-month use down 22% between 2022 and 2025, past-year use down 25%, and fewer teens starting at all. The Monitoring the Future survey of more than 23,000 students found that in 2025, 91% of eighth graders, 82% of tenth graders and 66% of twelfth graders had abstained from marijuana, alcohol and nicotine in the past thirty days. Historic highs for abstention.
What about legal states specifically? A 2023 JAMA Pediatrics analysis covering nearly a million teens across 47 states found that recreational legalization was not associated with higher odds or frequency of teen cannabis use. Colorado’s own Healthy Kids survey showed past-month use among high school students falling 37% from 2013 to 2023.
I owe you the caveat that a purist would demand. Much of the sharp drop in Monitoring the Future data happened between 2020 and 2021 and is widely attributed to the pandemic. Teen use did not rebound afterward, but it also did not keep falling. If someone tells you the last five years are a triumph of legalization, push back. The longer NSDUH trend is the better evidence, and it shows decline, not surge.
So both things can be true at the same time: parents are using more, and teens are using less. Siegel needs the first fact to carry the weight of the second. It cannot.
Association Dressed as Causation
Notice the verbs in the column. Fetal exposure “leads to” worse outcomes. Parental anxiety “leads directly” to child anxiety. Those verbs are doing work the data cannot support.
Even the study at the heart of the piece is modest about itself. Its authors did not assess parenting quality or children’s health, and the findings do not establish that a parent’s use causes adverse outcomes. The data relied on self-reports. A physician quoted in coverage of the same study said the association between parent and child use does not mean the parent’s use causes the child’s.
Why would the link not be causal? Because the same households that have a regular cannabis user are more likely to share genes, stress, neighborhood, access, and attitudes. Kids of heavy drinkers are also more likely to drink heavily. No one concludes that Dad’s bourbon reached through the genome to do it. We understand there are confounders. We simply forget that understanding when the substance is cannabis.
Then there are the numbers he does not source. The “close to 70 million” users, the THC levels for edibles and concentrates, the 2.5-times risk for children exposed in the womb, the “landmark” Harvard study with no figures attached: I cannot tell you which studies these come from because the column does not say. The “over 8%” figure he attributes to the National Center for Biotechnology Information resembles the share of parents using most days in the UCSD study, which is not the same thing as adults generally. NSDUH put past-year use among everyone aged twelve and older at around 22% in 2024. I do not know what his 8% measures, and a reader should not have to guess.
This is how a narrative gets built. You pick a real concern, attach a few large numbers, skip the denominators, and let the reader’s fear fill in the rest. The tobacco industry ran this playbook for decades. Anyone can do it, including people on my side of the debate, which is why I keep checking my own.
Siegel’s own comparison undermines him. By his count, 130 million Americans drink alcohol, twice the number who use cannabis. According to the CDC, excessive drinking kills about 178,000 Americans every year, roughly 488 a day, a 29% jump from 2016-2017 levels. His proposed remedy for cannabis is borrowed from the alcohol world: peer recovery in the style of Alcoholics Anonymous.
So a substance responsible for 178,000 annual deaths is the model of manageable, and a substance with no comparable overdose toll is “worse”? Parents who hold a glass of wine at dinner while asking whether the neighbor’s kid might see a joint need to explain how that works. If we protected children from intoxicants with the intensity we apply to this one plant, the liquor aisle would look different.
Here is where I land as a practical matter, and I am not handing out parenting licenses. Children are not served alcohol or weed. Full stop. What I am saying is that prohibition-style silence makes kids less prepared, not more.
I should tighten a claim I make often. Prohibition has not worked is the short version. The honest version is that prohibition fails at what it promises, which is eliminating supply and use, while generating costs that outrun its benefits. Even prisons, closed buildings with total control over their occupants, have not managed to keep drugs out. Education is the only tool that scales.
What does that look like at home? Talk before the issue arrives. Explain that a developing brain is more vulnerable than an adult one. Admit what you use if you use, and why, and what the rules are. Lock up the gummies. Never drive. Notice if the habit drifts from choice to need, because the UCSD figure of 6.7% of parents meeting the criteria for cannabis use disorder is real, and acknowledging it is what separates a responsible adult from a cheerleader.
Children raised in houses where drugs are discussed honestly tend to grow into adults who can make informed decisions about them. Some of them will use cannabis someday. That is also true of kids raised on strict silence, only with less information.
Siegel is right that parents who use cannabis daily should think hard about how it affects their parenting. He is right that edibles are a hazard to toddlers. He is wrong to imply that this adds up to a generation of children being swallowed by marijuana. Teen use is going down, including in the states where cannabis is legal.
When a column mixes a household-level statistic with a national-level conclusion, check the denominator. When it uses causal verbs for correlational findings, check the study’s own limitations. When it skips its sources, ask why. The same discipline applies to every article I write.
Protect your kids. Do it with data, not dread.
Sources
- Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News opinion, Oct. 29, 2026: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dr-marc-siegel-americas-awful-marijuana-addiction-spreading-parents-kids
- Fox affiliates’ coverage of the UC San Diego study (Addictive Behaviors), including parental-use figures and limitations: https://www.ktvu.com/news/marijuana-use-rises-sharply-among-one-group-americans-new-study-finds and https://www.fox29.com/news/marijuana-use-rises-sharply-among-one-group-americans-new-study-finds
- NORML on NSDUH 2014-2023 teen trends: https://norml.org/blog/2024/07/31/government-survey-data-shows-nearly-20-percent-decline-in-teen-marijuana-use-over-past-decade/
- NORML summary of the 2025 SAMHSA/NSDUH release: https://norml.org/blog/2026/07/27/federal-survey-marijuana-use-continues-multiyear-decline-among-teens-young-adults/amp/
- Monitoring the Future 2025 (NIDA/University of Michigan) via Contemporary Pediatrics: https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/teen-substance-use-remains-historically-low-in-2025-with-stability-across-most-drugs
- NSDUH 2024 insights, Partnership to End Addiction: https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/2024-national-drug-use-survey-insights/
- Tweet et al., “Pediatric edible cannabis exposures and acute toxicity: 2017-2021,” Pediatrics 2023: https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/edible-cannabis-exposure-and-toxicity-increase-among-young-children
- Myran et al., JAMA Network Open, Jan. 2022 (Ontario pediatric cannabis poisonings): https://www.uottawa.ca/about-us/media/news/cannabis-poisoning-young-children-increased-nine-times-after-legalization
- CDC, Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use in the United States: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html
- JAMA Pediatrics (April 2023) analysis of recreational legalization and adolescent use, and Healthy Kids Colorado Survey 2013-2023, as summarized in my earlier piece “The Kids Are Alright.”
TEEN CANNABIS USE, NOW WHAT, READ ON..
