Over the past four years, the number of people self-reporting as methamphetamine users on the big household survey is down by half, and meth initiation rates - a leading indicator, and therefore the one to watch - by 60%. The number of people self-reporting cocaine use is down by a third. Middle-school rates of drinking and smoking are also down, though less dramatically. Initiation to non-medical pain relievers remains high, but off its peak in the early 2000s, reached after a decade that saw initiation rise tenfold.
Oh, yes, and cannnabis use is up some (almost 20% from the 2007 trough, from ), especially among young adults (18-25). Cannabis use among those under 18 is flat. Mean age at first use is up from 17 to 18.4: that’s the direction you want to see it going.
So the on-one-foot summary of the results is “Nothing exciting, but basically good news.”
But if you were really, really, really stupid - or had a job that required you to pretend to be that way - you might just treat all use of illicit drugs as alike and simply count the number of users. In that case, the modest rise in cannabis use would swamp all the other results, because cannabis is by far the mostly widely used illicit drug, and a report mostly full of pretty good news would come out as “National Survey Shows a Rise in Illicit Drug Use,” complete with silly viewing-with-alarm quotes from officials.
(No, dammit, we are not “at a crossroads”! Next year is mostly going to look like this year.)
Even after 30 years in the business, it’s hard to get used to how plain damned dumb the official (and journalistic) discourse on this topic is. The household survey (aptly named NS-DUH, where DUH is pronouned “duhhhhhhhhh”) doesn’t get at what’s really interesting: the number of problem users, and especially criminally-active problem users. But it does contain some useful information. Too bad the people running the show mostly ignore that information and concentrate on fluff.