CDC Proposes Changing 2027 Youth Marijuana Survey to Drop Hemp Exclusion and Track How Teens Consume Cannabis

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is moving to make notable changes to how marijuana use is measured in its next national survey of high school students, including eliminating an instruction that told teenagers not to count hemp products and adding a question tracking how marijuana is consumed.

The changes appear in the proposed 2027 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), which the CDC has submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review.

Under the 2025 questionnaire, students were told that marijuana is also called pot or weed and instructed not to count “CBD-only or hemp products” when answering marijuana-use questions.

The proposed 2027 questionnaire changes that language. Students would instead be told to count “cannabis and marijuana,” while the exclusion would apply only to CBD-only products.

That means CDC would no longer explicitly tell students to exclude hemp products as an entire category. The distinction could be significant as intoxicating hemp-derived products containing delta-8 THC, delta-9 THC and other cannabinoids have become widely available since passage of the 2018 Farm Bill.

CBD-only products would continue to be excluded.

The core questions measuring lifetime marijuana use, age of first use and past-30-day use remain largely unchanged.

However, CDC is also proposing to add a fourth marijuana question asking students who used marijuana during the previous 30 days how they “usually” consumed it.

Students could select smoking marijuana in a joint, bong, pipe or blunt; eating it in foods such as brownies, cakes, cookies or candy; drinking it; vaping it; dabbing waxes or concentrates; or using it some other way.

The national YRBS previously asked a similar consumption-method question in 2015, but it disappeared from subsequent national questionnaires. The 2027 version would therefore restore the question for the first time in 12 years while adding dabbing as its own response option. CDC’s 2015 survey found that 90% of students who currently used marijuana said smoking was their usual method of consumption.

The changes could also affect comparisons between the 2025 and 2027 surveys. Because students in 2025 were specifically instructed not to count hemp products while the proposed 2027 wording eliminates that blanket exclusion, some use involving intoxicating hemp-derived products could potentially be captured differently even if underlying behavior does not change.

The shift comes shortly after CDC released its 2025 YRBS data, which found that 12.9% of U.S. high school students reported using marijuana during the previous 30 days, the lowest level recorded since the national survey began collecting comparable data in 1991.

According to the federal information collection filing, CDC is proposing 12 new questions, removing eight questions and modifying two others for the 2027 survey. The agency classified the package as a “no material or nonsubstantive change” to the currently approved information collection.

The YRBS is conducted every two years and is one of the federal government’s primary tools for tracking marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and other health-related behaviors among U.S. high school students.