Drug Trend Data
As the crisis line director for Oregon’s Alcohol and Drug HelpLine I had a pretty good sense of which drugs were causing people in Oregon problems. They were the same drugs that people always mentioned in their calls. And, because we tracked call volume by types of drugs mentioned, I could look back each year to see if anything had changed. Now days anyone can find this information on the internet including getting graphical representations here’s how.Google provides a nifty little tool called Google Trends it’s simple to use, and based on my knowledge and experience it’s quite accurate. Essentially this tool lets you look at the volume of searches done for anything. For example, say that you want to know in which countries people are looking for recipes to make meth, which would be a fairly good indicator of where meth making is a problem. You could type the words meth recipe in to Google trends and you would get a graph like this one.
Click this link to see a full sized imageof this graph.
Now that is slightly interesting, but where this gets much more interesting is when comparing trends.
Let’s say for example that you want to see what gets the most interest out of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine. That’s what this picture shows, though you’ll want to take a look at it in the full size version by clicking the image, here you’ll see that at the bottom of the graph I have chosen to focus on the United States as a region and to have Google rank the problem based on the term cocaine. A couple of things stand out for me about this graph. First, it almost mirrors what I saw year after year on the Alcohol and Drug HelpLine. Marijuana is the biggest illicit drug problem (alcohol is a far bigger problem, but I’ve chosen not to include it here). The next thing that stands out is the level of interest in cocaine. Why is this striking to me? This is not the case in Oregon. In the next image I am going to ask Google to rank the drugs based on meth, but before I do that take a look at the cities which rank highest for people searching on cocaine. Notice anything about them? If not compare them to this next set of data in which I keep everything the same except what drug is being ranked for.
Take a look at the cities in the full size version and you will discover what I had always heard. Meth is more popular on the West Coast. In fact, Meth was first noted as a problem in Hawaii and Oregon it then spread up and down the West Coast and began to move east across the country with the Mississippi River being a bit of a firewall for quite a long time. If you didn’t see it before what you will now notice is that the states and cities where Cocaine is most searched tend to be more in the eastern part of the U.S. while Meth is more searched in the west. Both have some cross over in the middle of the country.
Of course, neither cocaine nor meth come close to touching the interest in marijuana.
