DRUG ABUSE

Drug abuse is a major problem in today’s time. Drug abuse is growing in our world at an alarming rate. In the following assignment I collected drug abuse data from 3 different countries namely: USA, England and Australia. The following were the observations made:

USA

Drug abuse is proving to be a major problem in the United States of America where approximately 22.6% of the people belonging to the age group of 18-20 has been involved in some sort of substance abuse. Marijuana (cannabis) is proving to be the most widely being used illicit drug. It is followed by abuse of prescription drugs and cocaine. People above the age of 65 make up the least drug abusing population of the country with only 1.5%.

 

England

Out of the 3 countries analysed, England proves to be the least drug abusing country. But still the percentage of population involved in substance abuse has increased since 1998 to 2008 after which it has almost stayed constant. Marijuana remains the most abused drug with almost 0.555 million people taking it.

Australia

Out of the 3 countries analysed, Australia turns out to be the country with the most percentage of its population involved in substance abuse. 20.8% of its population of the age group 20-29 is involved. Drug abuse has almost stayed stagnant since 1998. In Australia a whopping 41.8% of its population has abused drugs.

 

General trends

Marijuana is the drug being taken the most in all the 3 countries despite it being illegal in all 3 of them (though it has been decriminalised in some of the states in Australia and USA). Out of the 3 countries abuse is the most in Australia and least in England.

 

8% of the population spends more than 200 pounds on drugs in England.

In a survey on people addicted to drugs it was found out that 5% of them had committed crimes in order to fund their drugs (source : http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/05/-sp-drug-use-is-rising-in-the-uk-but-were-not-addicted)

 Special Mention:

Due to lack of credibility of data and lack of data itself I was not able to include the statistics for India, even though I would like to mention some the random data. Drug abuse is growing on to become a major epidemic in Punjab. According to a survey by AIIMS around 75% of the addicts are of the age 15-25. Opium and Heroin are the main drugs being used. Also approximately Rs. 20 crores of drug dealing is done everyday in Punjab. (source : http://www.pbhealth.gov.in/pods.pdf).