Ask most people to picture a daily cannabis user in Britain and they will describe a student in a haze of smoke. A new national survey suggests that picture is out of date. The people most likely to use cannabis every day are not in their late teens or early twenties. They are in their thirties, forties and fifties, they are more often out of work, and they usually smoke tobacco too.
The findings come from a study by a team of UK addiction researchers working with the charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), published in the journal Addiction in November 2026. The team analysed answers from 25,537 adults across England, Scotland and Wales, collected in February and March of 2023 and 2024, and estimated that around 1.2 million people in Great Britain use cannabis daily. That is roughly two and a half times the most widely quoted official figure.
Key Takeaways
Of the 25,537 adults surveyed, 7.2% said they had used cannabis in the past year, and almost a quarter of that group (24.2%, or 432 people) said they used it every day. Scaled up to the adult population, that points to about 1.2 million daily users in Great Britain, compared with roughly 470,000 in official estimates for England and Wales. The gap seems to come mostly from how “daily” is defined rather than from people suddenly using more. Young adults were the most likely to have tried cannabis in the past year, but among people who used it, those aged 25 and over were far more likely to use it every day, with the risk peaking between 35 and 54. Daily use was also more common among people who were unemployed, people who currently smoke tobacco and people who smoke their cannabis rather than taking it another way. Gender, ethnicity, region, social grade, anxiety and depression showed no clear link once other factors were accounted for. The data are self-reported, the question wording changed between the two survey years, and the study shows associations, not causes.
Daily Cannabis Use in Great Britain: The Survey Behind the 1.2 Million Figure
The data come from the ASH Smokefree Great Britain Survey, an annual online poll run through YouGov that mainly tracks smoking and vaping. Since cannabis is so often mixed with tobacco in Britain, the survey also asks about it. The researchers pooled the 2023 and 2024 waves, which gave them 25,537 adults aged 18 and over.
Everyone was asked how often, in the last 12 months, they had used cannabis “in any way”. The team then sorted people into three groups: no use in the past year, non-daily use, and daily use. YouGov weights its results by age, sex, social class, region, education and ethnicity so the sample mirrors the adult population, checked against the census and official population estimates.
Two numbers anchor the study. First, 7.2% of adults (1,882 people) had used cannabis in the past year, which is in line with other national surveys. Second, 24.2% of those past-year users said they used it every day. In the whole sample, daily users made up 1.7% of adults. Multiply that across Great Britain’s adult population and you get roughly 1.2 million people.
The researchers also registered their analysis plan in advance on the Open Science Framework, which means they committed to their main questions before looking at the results. That is a good sign for a study of this kind, because it makes it harder to go fishing for eye-catching findings after the fact.
Why 1.2 Million and Not 470,000?
The figure most people cite for daily cannabis use comes from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, run by the Office for National Statistics. Its latest drug misuse release found that 6.5% of adults aged 16 to 59 had used cannabis in the past year. According to the new paper, about 10.4% of those users, or roughly 470,000 people, reported daily use.
So how can one survey find 470,000 daily users and another 1.2 million? The answer is not that one of them is wrong about how many people use cannabis at all. On that point they broadly agree. The Crime Survey recorded past-year use at 7.6% in 2023 and 6.8% in 2024, and the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey put it at 8.7% in 2024. The ASH survey’s 7.2% sits comfortably in that range.
The disagreement is about frequency, and it comes down to the answer options people are given. Think of it like asking someone whether they go to the gym “every day”. A person who goes five or six times a week may tick “every day” if there is no better box, but will pick “most days” if that option exists.
That is exactly what seems to have happened here. In 2023, the ASH survey offered “once a week” or “daily”, with nothing in between. In 2024 it added “more than once a week”. The share of users reporting daily use fell from 30.6% in 2023 to 18.3% in 2024, which the authors read as a wording effect rather than a real drop. When they grouped “more than once a week” together with “daily”, the year difference flipped, while every other finding held.
The authors point out that if the Crime Survey counted “daily or near-daily” use, including people who use three to five days a week, its figure would rise to 17.8% of users. Another dataset, the International Cannabis Policy Study, puts daily or near-daily use among UK users at 26.9%. Whether using five days a week carries noticeably less risk than using seven is not known, and the difference may be small. That is why the researchers argue that surveys should report daily and near-daily use consistently: otherwise, the number of people in the highest-risk group may be underestimated.
The Age Surprise: Cannabis Use in Older Adults
The finding that stands out most is about age. As expected, 18 to 24-year-olds were the most likely to have used cannabis at all in the past year. But among people who did use it, the younger group was the least likely to use it daily.
Here is the share of past-year users who used cannabis every day, by age:
- 18 to 24: 12.1%
- 25 to 34: 21.5%
- 35 to 44: 33.0%
- 45 to 54: 33.7%
- 55 and over: 29.6%
After adjusting for other factors, people aged 35 to 44 were about twice as likely to be daily users as 18 to 24-year-olds (adjusted risk ratio 2.09), and the pattern held for every older age band. This runs against some US data, where daily use tends to be more common among young adults.
Why might this be? The study did not ask people why they used cannabis, so the authors can only suggest possibilities. One is medical use. Since 2018, specialist doctors in the UK have been able to prescribe cannabis-based medicines, and private prescriptions have grown fast, as our analysis of UK medical cannabis prescription data shows. Many more people self-medicate with unregulated cannabis. A separate UK study cited by the authors found that close to half of past-year users reported at least some medical use. The researchers say larger surveys that track both frequency and motive are needed before drawing firm conclusions.
What the age finding does show is that prevention and treatment services built mainly around teenagers and students may miss a large group of heavy users in middle age, a group that also faces rising age-related risks for the heart and lungs.
Tobacco, Spliffs and Smoke
In Britain, cannabis is most often smoked as a spliff: dried flower or resin rolled up with tobacco. Earlier surveys found that between 68.0% and 75.5% of British cannabis users name this as their usual method. In the new data, 71.2% of past-year users reported smoking cannabis in some form, with or without tobacco.
Both smoking habits were strongly linked to daily use. Among past-year users who currently smoked tobacco, 35.0% used cannabis daily, compared with 15.0% of those who did not smoke (adjusted risk ratio 1.82). Among those who smoked their cannabis, 28.8% were daily users, compared with 12.9% of those who used other methods (adjusted risk ratio 1.62).
This fits with earlier work from the same survey. A 2020 analysis found that tobacco smokers had 24.6 times greater odds of using cannabis daily than non-smokers. One explanation researchers raise is that nicotine dependence may partly drive cannabis use when the two are mixed: someone who rolls spliffs may be reaching for the tobacco as much as the cannabis. For health, the combination matters because burning plant material produces harmful toxicants on top of any effect of the cannabis itself.
Unemployment and Daily Use
People who were not working were also more likely to use cannabis every day. Among past-year users, 36.7% of those not in employment used daily, compared with 21.2% of employed people and 11.6% of students. After adjustment, being out of work was linked to a 34% higher risk of daily use (adjusted risk ratio 1.34).
The study cannot say which way this runs. Heavy cannabis use could make it harder to find or keep a job. Losing work could also lead people to use more, or both could be driven by something else, such as poor health. A review cited by the authors found the same link and suggested it may work in both directions.
What Did Not Show Up
Some of the null results are as useful as the positive ones. Men and women were equally likely to be daily users once other factors were taken into account (24.0% and 24.6%). Ethnicity, social grade and region were not linked to daily use either. Daily use looked higher in Scotland (29.7%) and lower in London (18.6%), but these differences were not statistically significant.
The researchers expected a link with mental health, given that heavy cannabis use is associated with psychosis, depression and cannabis use disorder in other research. In this sample, 32.7% of users who had been treated for anxiety in the past year used cannabis daily, against 21.5% of those who had not. But after adjustment, the difference was not statistically significant, and depression showed no link at all. The authors think the groups may simply have been too small to detect an effect, and they call for larger studies.
How Strong Is This Evidence?
This is a large, carefully weighted survey, but it has clear limits, and readers should keep them in mind.
Everything is self-reported. Cannabis is illegal in the UK outside of prescriptions, so some people may under-report or describe their use inaccurately. The survey is cross-sectional, a snapshot taken at one moment, so it can show which groups are more likely to use daily but not why. The change in answer options between 2023 and 2024 complicates any comparison between years. The stepwise statistical method used to build the final model may have dropped some factors that would have mattered in combination. And the number of daily users, 432 people, is modest once it is split into subgroups such as ethnic groups or specific mental health conditions.
The 1.2 million figure itself is an extrapolation from 1.7% of a sample to the whole adult population. It is a reasonable estimate, not a head count.
Where Britain Fits
The context matters. Cannabis is a Class B drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and possession without a prescription remains a criminal offence. Medical cannabis has been legal on prescription since November 2018, and patients carrying prescribed products have been the subject of new police guidance on medical cannabis.
The paper also notes worrying trends behind stable headline numbers. Signs of cannabis dependence across the population rose from 2.8% in 2014 to 5.4% in 2024, and more people are seeking treatment, even though the share of adults using cannabis has barely moved. The authors suggest rising potency and the delayed effects of earlier increases in use may help explain this.
Britain is not alone in trying to measure heavy use more precisely. Germany, which took a very different legal path, has produced its own large dataset on how consumption changed after partial legalisation. For a wider view of how European countries regulate cannabis, see our country-by-country guide to cannabis laws in Europe, and for the global picture, our breakdown of the latest UN figures on cannabis use worldwide.
What It Means for Policy
The study’s main message is that counting how many people use cannabis is not enough. Two countries, or two years, can have the same share of users and very different levels of risk, depending on how often those users consume and how they do it.
For the authors, the people who most need attention are those carrying several risks at once: daily use, smoking as the route, tobacco mixed in, and often older age. They argue that prevention and treatment services should be designed to reach middle-aged and older adults, not just the young, and that programmes should tackle cannabis and tobacco together rather than separately. They also call on national surveys to report daily and near-daily use consistently, so that the size of the heaviest-using group is not underestimated. The next Crime Survey release on drug misuse in England and Wales is scheduled for December 2026, and it will be worth watching how it reports frequency.
FAQ
There is no single official definition, but researchers usually treat daily or near-daily use as heavy use, often meaning four or more days a week. In this study, “daily” meant people who chose the “every day” option. The authors argue that daily and near-daily use should be counted together, because the health difference between using five days a week and seven is likely small, and frequent use is a common marker of higher risk.
National surveys put past-year use at roughly 7% to 9% of adults. The ASH survey found 7.2% across Great Britain, while the Crime Survey for England and Wales found 6.5% of 16 to 59-year-olds in its latest release. The new study estimates that about 1.2 million adults in Great Britain use cannabis daily, though official estimates using a stricter definition of daily use put the figure for England and Wales at around 470,000.
It depends on what you measure. Young adults aged 18 to 24 are the most likely to have used cannabis in the past year. But among people who use it, those aged 35 to 54 are the most likely to use it every day: around a third of users in that age range reported daily use, compared with 12.1% of 18 to 24-year-olds.
No, not for recreational use. Cannabis is a Class B controlled drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and possessing, growing or supplying it without authorisation is a criminal offence. Since November 2018, specialist doctors have been able to prescribe cannabis-based medicinal products, so a patient with a valid prescription can legally possess the prescribed product. CBD products with no more than trace levels of controlled cannabinoids are sold legally, but they are subject to separate food and medicines rules.
Legal Disclaimer
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It summarises published research and does not constitute medical, legal or professional advice, nor does it encourage the use of cannabis or any other substance. Cannabis laws differ between countries and change over time, and in the United Kingdom non-prescribed cannabis remains a controlled drug. Readers should consult a qualified healthcare professional before making decisions about their health and seek independent legal advice about the laws that apply to them.
