Monday Map: The Distribution of Drug Use

categories: Criminal Justice Map, War on Drugs

Published August 03, 2009 @ 04:46PM PT

Here's your Monday map - a look at the use of illegal substances other than marijuana across the United States.

The map comes via the great map blog The Map Scroll, using data from the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. Map Scroll went on to post maps by specific drugs here, and makes some interesting observations:

...Another thing that challenges my prejudices is that there doesn't seem to be any correlation between the wealth or human development of states and their level of drug use. Some high-development states, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, have low levels of drug use; and some, like Massachusetts and Colorado, have high levels of drug use. And some low-development states, like Arkansas and Tennessee, have high levels of drug use, while others, like South Carolina and Alabama, have low levels of drug use. There do seem to be some regional trends - especially the high rates of drug use in the non-Mormon West - but a lot of variation within regions as well. All in all it just looks pretty random.

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Comments (6)

These numbers actually seem quite low to me, therefor a bit re-assuring. Maybe I've just been hanging out with the wrong crowd. ;)

Posted by Michael Jarrell on 08/03/2009 @ 09:53PM PT
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I can't believe the Dakotas have a low drug use rate. If I lived there, I'd be "huffing" arsenic.

Posted by Turk Fowler on 08/04/2009 @ 08:37AM PT
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I don't think the SAMHSA national survey of 135,000 people would be able to bring accurate statistics on drug use. The sample size is too small and open surveys, even if anonymous, are likely to have false answers.

Even with that being said, I would like to see the numbers with marijuana added in, just for the sake of comparison. I'm sure the percentages would jump considerably.

Posted by Dennis G. on 08/04/2009 @ 09:41AM PT
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Dennis - here's the map including pot - http://mapscroll.blogspot.com/2009/07/drug-use-in-united-states.html

Posted by Matt Kelley on 08/04/2009 @ 10:28AM PT
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As I suspected, the percentages more than doubled with pot included, although the numbers still seem a bit low to me.

Thanks for the additional information Matt.

Posted by Dennis G. on 08/04/2009 @ 10:47AM PT
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WTF change the format can't find anything on legalizing cannabis....If I were new to the site how could you even know it is the number one issue on this site????

CFJ

Posted by Cherokee Fred Jesus on 08/05/2009 @ 12:12PM PT
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Matt has worked and volunteered in various capacities in criminal justice reform for several years. When he's not blogging, he works as the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project. Views expressed here are Matt's, and don't represent the positions of the Innocence Project.