If you fired up a bowl of Humboldt's finest to unwind last night, and still made it to the PTA meeting and your Fortune 500 job this morning, there's a new survey of recreational drug use on the Web that is targeting you.
The survey, called Drugnet, aims to track patterns of drug consumption among what researcher Tom Nicholson calls "the largest population of drug users in America - people who use drugs in a controlled, limited way, whose central focus is not drugs, but their families, friends and communities."
By deploying their questionnaire on the Web, the researchers are hoping to use the relative anonymity of the Net to access a "hidden population" of drug users who would be disinclined to give accurate reports of illegal use to face-to-face interviewers, Nicholson says.
Drugnet researcher John White, who, like Nicholson, is a professor of public health at Western Kentucky University, adds that the study aims to fill a gap in the available research literature created by the fact that many published studies focus on drug users who are in rehab or are students. In an era when national drug policy is based on prohibition and interdiction, says White, "It's an open secret that successful people do these drugs, but no one talks about it... There's a myth that all drug use is abuse."
The third co-author of the study, David Duncan, author of the textbook Drugs and the Whole Person, admits that the group is being "really experimental" by drawing its respondents from the Net. While some studies in the past have relied on newspaper ads or word of mouth to cast a net around their sample population, the authors of Drugnet are using a modern, if crude, way of marshaling eyeballs to their site: spamming mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. (The group's post to rec.antiques launched a thread about collecting 19th century drug paraphernalia.)
The advantage of tapping the Net as a sample, Duncan claims, is that the online world is skewed toward a well-educated, employed, higher-income population - the very stratum of "successful" users the study is intended to reach.
Contrary to media stereotypes of drug users as dysfunctional misfits, when the researchers conducted a pilot study for two weeks last November, they found their sample of 276 users were "a little more socially involved than the average American," Duncan observes - "more likely to vote regularly, more likely to be politically active, and they read more." And the respondents were "a close match to population norms" on a scale of social functioning used by the National Center of Health Statistics called the General Well-Being Schedule, he says.
About a quarter of the respondents said they used LSD, with several citing "spiritual exploration" as a reason for their consumption of the drug. "It's a well-known fact that hallucinogens can be used as a religious, life-changing experience," says White. "People do it, but they feel they can't really talk about it in an atmosphere of non-charged discourse."
Contributing to the "charge" around that discourse is White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey "spreading the dogma" of the Just Say No approach to drug education "as thick as he can," Duncan says, adding that studies like Drugnet have been discouraged because "it doesn't help you to get grants to go against the mainstream of thought."
Each year, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration releases a widely-referenced report called the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Joe Gfroerer of the agency's Office of Applied Studies says that the study uses "self-administered answer sheets," returned to the interviewers in sealed envelopes, for the sections of the survey concerned with illegal drug use. Though Gfroerer admits that the survey is prone to "underreporting" - especially of "hard-core use" of drugs like heroin - he disputes the researchers' claim that the Internet is the best way to get a representative sample and accurate reporting of drug use.
"I'm not sure that people would feel more secure reporting sensitive data over the Internet," Gfroerer says. "The problem with the Net is, you're responding to people you can't see, and you have no idea if the study is legitimate. We send a representative to people's homes who show identification and explain the significance of the study."
He did say, however, that if the study was "controlled properly," you could get a "very large sample" of valuable data.
The researchers admit that some Web surfers have expressed reservations about answering queries about illegal activities over the Net. As an extra security measure, survey instructions urge respondents to access the questionnaire via the Anonymizer. White says that the research team is presently applying for a grant to purchase a secure server, for an enlarged version of Drugnet that could extend for years.
"This is just the beginning of this study," says Nicholson. "We're looking at the future."
