Risky Drug

Drug use and risky behavior

Kaiyu He(kh3074), Xueqing Huang(xh2470), Yongzi Yu(yy3103), Ruiqi Yan(ry2417), Hao Xu(hx2328)

Intro

According to WHO, the United States has the highest level of illegal drug use compared with other countries in 2019. The two most commonly used illicit drugs are marijuana and opioids. Overall drug use was also reported to be on the rise. The NSDUH survey in 2019 indicated that 20.8% of people aged 12 and over had illicit drug use, which is a notable increase from 2015 (Buddy, T. 2021) . Illegal drug abuse is more important to be prevented among the youth, since drugs are more harmful to them, such as affecting the growth of brains, impairing memories and concentration. Thus, we would like to study the drug use abuse among youth to detect some patterns, which would be useful for policymakers to develop strategies with explicit targets, and thus achieve the most effective results.
Our next step was to examine which patterns are important for the policymakers to make problem-oriented strategies. The most conspicuous one is the drug use by the state. We also expect finding the patterns of different drug use to be helpful, such as average age, race, and gender of illegal drug use by the drug. Moreover, we learned an example of a case-control study from the Epidemiology course illustrating that drug use might be associated with other behaviors affecting personal health, so we would also develop our study to explore patterns in this area.