I found some additional charts produced by the Federal government concerning drug and alcohol use by the American citizenry I thought were facinating. I think you might find them useful as well, so they are included in this post. They come from the latest annual survey by SAMHSA detailing drug,alcohol,and tobbaco use by the American public. They detail both how our neighbors are doing, and how our kids are doing, and show a relative stability to the trends over the last few years. I’ll let the charts speak for themselves.
This first chart shows which drugs were first used by initiates the past year.
As you can see, Marijuana still leads the pack, followed by pain relievers then inhalants.
This next chart shows drug usage by age over ths past month,
As you can see the 16 to 29 group continues to lead the pack, accounting for over 55% of last months drug usage.
Continuing that theme this chart shows DUI by age for the last month.
Once again, the 16 to 29 age group leads the group showing over 65% of the total.
And finally, this last chart shows which substances generated the most requests for treatment in the last month.