What do we learn from the Global Drug Use Survey?
That’s the online summary at Stuff. When you point at one of the bubbles it jumps out at you and tells you what drug it is. The bubbles make it relatively hard to compare non-adjacent numbers, especially as you can only see the name of one at a time. It’s not even that easy to compare adjacent bubbles, eg, the two at the lower right, which differ by more than two percentage points.
More importantly, this is the least useful data from the survey. Because it’s a voluntary, self-selected online sample, we’d expect the crude proportions to be biased, probably with more drug use in the sample than the population. To the extent that we can tell, this seems to have happened: the proportion of past-year smokers is 33.5% compared to the Census estimate of 15% active smokers. It’s logically possible for both of these to be correct, but I don’t really believe it. The reports of cannabis use are much higher than the (admittedly out of date) NZ Alcohol and Drug Use Survey. For this sort of data, the forthcoming drug-use section of the NZ Health Survey is likely to be more representative.
Where the Global Drug Use Survey will be valuable is in detail about things like side-effects, attempts to quit, strategies people use for harm reduction. That sort of information isn’t captured by the NZ Health Survey, and presumably it is still being processed and analysed. Some of the relative information might be useful, too: for example, synthetic cannabis is much less popular than the real thing, with past-year use nearly five times lower.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
“for example, synthetic cannabis is much less popular than the real thing, with past-year use nearly five times lower.”
This is despite the fact that you can *buy it in a dairy* rather than organising a business transaction with a hardened criminal. Says a lot.
11 years ago
You actually can’t *buy it in a dairy*, and you couldn’t during the term of the survey. But you can buy it in a fairly large range of places and online.
11 years ago