Today at the White House President Bush announced the results of this year’s Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey. This widely respected survey, conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, tracks smoking, drinking, and illicit drug use among the nation’s secondary school students, assessing every year about 50,000 8th, 10th, and 12th graders in more than 400 secondary schools.

The key findings are that 8th, 10th, and 12th graders across the country are continuing to show a gradual decline in the proportions reporting use of illicit drugs.

“The cumulative declines since recent peak levels of drug involvement in the mid-1990’s are quite substantial, especially among the youngest students,” said University of Michigan Distinguished Research Scientist Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator of the MTF study.

The proportion of 8th graders reporting use of an illicit drug at least once in the 12 months prior to the survey was 24 percent in 1996 but has fallen to 13 percent by 2007, a drop of nearly half. The decline has been less among 10th graders, from 39 percent to 28 percent between 1997 and 2007, and least among 12th graders, a decline from the recent peak of 42 percent in 1997 to 36 percent this year. All three grades showed some continuing decline this year in the prevalence of illicit drug use, though only the one-year decline in 8th grade (a drop of 1.6 percentage points) achieved statistical significance. The rates for the three grades now stand at 13 percent, 28 percent, and 36 percent. Today 860,000 fewer young people than in 2001 are using drugs.

According to the MTF survey, we also saw a drop in smoking for all three grades. Including the decline this year, the rate of smoking in the prior 30 days is now down by two thirds among 8th graders to 7 percent from the peak level reached in 1996 of 21 percent. “That should eventually translate into many fewer illnesses and premature deaths for this generation of young people,” said Johnston. This year’s survey also noted the long-term decline in alcohol use among eighth-graders, down to 31.8 percent in 2007 from a peak of 46.8 percent in 1994.

“We are definitely seeing a decline in substance abuse among our youngest and most vulnerable teens,” said Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the director of the National Institutes of Health.

The results from the MTF survey builds on the good news we have seen on a range of social issues during the last ten to fifteen years, progress that my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Yuval Levin and I discuss in our essay in the December 2007 issue of COMMENTARY.

What accounts for the progress we’re witnessing? When it comes to teen drug use, smoking, and alcohol consumption, a key factor is perceptions of the dangers, consequences, and acceptability of using illegal substances. And those perceptions, in turn, are shaped by the messages, including the moral messages, sent by parents and adults, schools, community groups, television ads, and government (both in terms of what its leaders say and the policies they implement). Drug use, like welfare and crime, are areas in which we have seen public policies make an enormous and positive impact.

It is generally considered obvious that government should not, indeed cannot legislate morality. But in fact it does so, frequently; it should do so more often; and it never does anything more important. By the legislation of morality I mean the enactment of laws and implementation of policies that proscribe, mandate, regulate, or subsidize behavior that will, over time, have the predictable effect of nurturing, bolstering, or altering habits, dispositions and values on a broad scale.

So saith George Will in his 1983 book Statecraft As Soulcraft: What Government Does. Will was right in what he wrote—and we are seeing some of the good fruits of statecraft in the MTF results today.