More on the Geography of Drugs in the US

Some people wanted to see maps of the distributions of specific drugs, to which I say: very well! Here are some more maps derived from the SAMHSA report's own maps. First, weed:



Here's coke:



Here's painkillers:



Here's a heroin map, based on a different SAMHSA report (note this one shows "TEDS treatment admissions," rather than actual use):



And here's a map for meth (from a previous post; also shows admissions rather than drug use per se):



Some interesting stuff here. I wonder how it's possible for New York to be in the top quintile for cocaine use, and New Jersey to be in the bottom quintile. And I wonder why heroin is so heavily concentrated in the Northeast Corridor while that same region is practically meth-free. And I wonder why the Mountain West uses tons of drugs, but the Plains states not so much. And I wonder why Mississippians don't like to do drugs. I wonder many things.

There are more maps in the SAMHSA report, but again I warn you: their color scheme is profoundly misguided.

UPDATE: All right, one more. Here's overall drug use, non-marijuana division:

Drug Use in the United States

This report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) details drug use across the 50 states based on the 2006 and 2007 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, which involved interviews with over 135,000 people around the country. It revealed a rather wide range of reported drug use between states, as you can see in this map, which is derived from a map in the report:



The report actually has its own maps, but I warn you that they are very ugly. That's why I had to make my own.

A couple things are striking about this map. The less surprising of these things is that there's a very wide range in the numbers of people who report using drugs in the past year - from 5.55% in North Dakota to 11.10% in Alaska. I should say: in itself this isn't surprising, but the particular pattern of the distribution does surprise me somewhat. I would expect higher rates of drug use in states with smaller rural populations, but this map seems to show that that's just a false intuition.

The other striking thing about the map - and 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. What do you think - am I missing something here?

(Thanks to Nikolas Schiller for the link.)

UPDATE: Richard Florida has some interesting follow-up in a couple of posts; he uses actual statistics and stuff do dig into this data a bit more. (One tidbit: more people do drugs in Obama states! Republicans ought to appreciate that. Come to think of it, Democrats might appreciate that as well...)

Meth Map of the US

This map of methamphetamine use by state is based on data from PBS, who ran a Frontline episode on the meth epidemic a while back.



They actually have their own map of this data (which is from 2003, by the way), but it doesn't capture enough of the variation at the top of the scale between a state like Kansas, which had 54 meth users per 100,000 residents admitted for treatment, and Oregon, which has 212.

Meth's West Coast origins are obvious from this map and, at least as of a few years ago, the drug had yet to make serious inroads on the East Coast. PBS's chart has a substantial capsule on each state. For Oregon, for instance, they say:

Methamphetamine is currently one of the most widely abused drugs in Oregon, where there are more individuals seeking treatment for a meth addiction per capita than in any other state in the nation. In 2004, 8,561 residents sought treatment for meth addiction, or about 19.0 percent of all persons seeking substance abuse treatment -- more than the number of people seeking treatment for cocaine and marijuana abuse combined. Although this number has decreased from a high of 9,463 individuals in 2002, it has increased from 2000 when 7,665 did. Although Mexican traffickers provide most of the meth in circulation in Oregon, the state is also home to a large number of local clandestine labs. In 2004, DEA, state and local officials seized 472 labs. Similarly, "crystal" meth, the purer, more addictive form of the drug, is becoming increasingly available throughout the state and is the exclusive variety now available in Central Oregon. This type of meth is often taken intravenously and is thought to be the cause of a recent rise in syphilis cases, and state health officials fear it might cause a boom in cases of HIV.

Meth causes bad problems:

In 2005 it was reported that 58 percent of law enforcement officials in 500 counties surveyed by the National Association of Counties cite methamphetamine as their biggest drug problem. Half in the sample said that up to 20 percent of their inmates were incarcerated because of meth-related crimes, and some segments representing small counties and areas in the upper Midwest reported as many as 75 to 100 percent of their incarcerations as meth-related.

While that survey drew on a disproportionate number of counties in the West where meth is most widely available, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) in February 2005, published results from a larger, random sample of 3,400 drug enforcement agencies nationwide. In the NDIC survey, for the first time since they have been taking such surveys, a plurality (40 percent) considered meth their leading drug threat. Cocaine came in second at 36 percent, and marijuana at 12 percent.

Needless to say, we're taking our usual hyperventilating "ban it!" approach to dealing with the problem rather than focusing on prevention and treatment. That's not to say prevention and treatment would rub out the problem; but we all know what sorts of raging successes are likely to derive from the War-On-Drugs approach. At the very least, color me skeptical that sending a whole new class of addicted individuals to prison is likely to do much to solve the social problems for which the drug is responsible.