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More than 10 Percent of Adults Abuse or Become Dependent on Drugs During their Lifetime |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: 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, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. 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. "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.
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