Approximately 10.3 percent of U.S. adults appear to have problems with drug use or abuse during their lives, including 2.6 percent who become drug dependent at some point, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.
Drug abuse refers to the intense desire to take drugs at the exclusion of other activities, and dependence occurs when the body becomes physically dependent on an illicit substance. Both are widespread and associated with substantial costs to society and individuals, according to background information in the article. "Although extensive data on drug use in the U.S. population have been available on an ongoing basis for adults and adolescents, epidemiologic data on the prevalence, correlates, disability, treatment and comorbidity of drug use disorders among adults are seldom collected," the authors write. "In fact, it has been more than 16 years since such detailed information on drug use disorders in the United States has been published."
Wilson M. Compton, M.D., M.P.E., of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bethesda, Md., and colleagues at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism used data from in-person interviews conducted in 2001 and 2002 with 43,093 adults representative of the entire U.S. population to determine the prevalence of abuse or dependence on nicotine, alcohol or one of 10 classes of other drugs: sedatives, tranquilizers, opiates [other than heroin], stimulants, hallucinogens, cannabis, cocaine, inhalants/solvents, heroin and other drugs. Participants were also assessed for other psychiatric disorders, including mood (such as depression), anxiety (such as panic disorder) and personality disorders (including obsessive-compulsive disorder). For those with drug use disorders, level of disability,how much the disorder affected their daily life,were ranked on a scale of zero to 100, with lower scores indicating more disability.
Over the previous 12 months, 1.4 percent of the participants reported that they had abused drugs and 0.6 percent reported that they were dependent on drugs, while 7.7 percent reported that they developed drug abuse and 2.6 percent drug dependence over their lifetime. Rates of abuse and dependence tended to be higher among men, Native Americans, those age 18 to 44, lower socioeconomic groups, those living in the West and those who were not married.