National Survey of Drug Use and Health

Lately, I’ve been exploring the data set that was recently released by the National Survey of Drug Use and Health. There’s enough raw data in it to spend months trying to make sense of it all. That said, for the moment I thought that I would simply post the following chart I generated using a very quick calculation of the relative frequencies of substance abuse broken down by substance.

The variables used in this analysis were ABUSEALC, ABUSECOC, ABUSEHAL, ABUSEHER, ABUSEINH, ABUSEMRJ, ABUSEANL, ABUSESED, ABUSESTM, ABUSETRN. The meanings of these variables are somewhat obscure, but my hope is that the definition of abuse is similar enough across substances to allow for a relative frequency analysis. Every subject classified as abusing a substance was summed over and then the resulting number was divided by the total number of subjects in the data set to find a frequency of abuse per substance.