Who Uses Illegal Drugs in America?
The federal government’s annual National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, based on information from about 70,000 Americans, aims to answer that question. Conventional wisdom says that drug use is heavier among urban and minority populations — but the survey statistics refute that. Whites and blacks use illegal drugs at the same rate, 6.4 percent of each population. The rates are lower for Hispanics (5.3 percent) and Asians (2.7 percent). The one minority population in the United States that uses illegal drugs at a substantially higher rate than average is Native Americans (12.6 percent), who also have the highest rates of severe poverty. Illegal drug use is slightly higher in small metropolitan areas than in large metropolitan areas. Among youth, the drug-use rates are highest in “metropolitan, non-urban counties” — in other words, the suburbs. (A separate study, by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York, found that eighth graders in ru
