Before people begin to use a drug more or less regularly, they have to use it for the first time. The government's drug experts call first use of a drug its "incidence" of use or the event of "initiation." The government's chief drug survey, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (formerly called the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, conducted a…
The prevalence of drug use is tracked by SAMHSA in its National Survey and by the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), also sponsored by SAMHSA, which collects data from the emergency departments of the nation's hospitals. DAWN also collects drug-related mortality data, as does the National Center for Health Statistics, another element of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Data…
Under Section 505 of the Public Health Services Act, SAMHSA is required to collect data on drug episodes as observed in the emergency rooms of the nation's hospitals. The agency does this under a program called the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN). The data collected by DAWN at six-month intervals are not considered to measure prevalence, but the sample of hospitals used has been chosen to…
SAMHSA's DAWN program also collects data on drug-related mortality. The data are collected and published for metropolitan areas and counties. According to DAWN, its locally collected data cannot be used for national estimates of drug abuse-related mortality because, among other reasons, the samples are skewed toward urban areas and are also incomplete. National data, however, are available …
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