May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor.
Guess what?! When it comes to using drugs and living a normal life, the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. Unfortunately, the topic of drugs and drug use has become emotional rather than rational. In this blog post, we will review some interesting statistics around drug use and how the reality of drug use may not align with our daily dramatic news stories.
For this post, we are going to stick with the popular subject of addiction. Although I despise the word and hope it is someday scrapped, we will use it because it's currently what we are working with. I prefer to consider drug use on a spectrum from healthy relationships with drugs to unhealthy relationships with drugs but clearly I don’t write the rules. Currently, we refer to drug-related disorders as substance use disorders (SUD). The rates of the US population that meet the criteria for a substance use disorder tend to remain in the range of 10-20% (American Psychiatric Association, 2022; US Dept of Health and Human Services, 2021).
Stay with me; I promise it gets more interesting. Now, let's take a closer look at those numbers. First off, if 10-20% of people meet the criteria for a substance use disorder, then 80-90% of people do not. Granted, studies are limited, but even with these basic statistics, we can see that drug use stories and statistics are often skewed toward catastrophizing drug use when, in fact, the vast majority of people who use drugs do so without encountering any major life issues.
A remarkably insightful study that did not receive enough headlines showed that most people who develop unhealthy relationships with substances go on to live normal, happy lives. Another similar study from the CDC found that about 75% of people who develop unhealthy relationships with substances eventually recover. You can find both of these studies here
So, looking at our bigger picture, we have a few key takeaways:
Most people who use drugs do so safely and responsibly.
Of those who do develop an unhealthy relationship with drugs, most resolve the issue and go on to live normal lives.
Inevitably, in every presentation I do, I get one person who gives me feedback suggesting that I am minimizing the dangers of drug use. Maybe this person follows me from town to town just waiting to fill out my presentation evaluation forms, or perhaps the ideas around drug use have been catastrophized for so long that any ideas about drug use not being as dangerous as our popular news stories or our personal experiences are automatically threatening.
Drug use has become an emotional topic rather than a rational one because we have each been impacted in one way or another by drug use. Many of us have had our own unhealthy relationships with drugs or witnessed a family member or loved one experience this path. However, the uncomfortable reality is that as powerful as these experiences are, they do not represent most people who use drugs.
My goal isn't to decide if drugs are good or bad; drugs and drug use are here to stay, so at some point, we have to accept it. My goal is to educate people with the skills to decide how to manage their own relationships with drugs. Drugs can
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 TR). American Psychiatric Publishing.
Kelly, J. F., Bergman, B. G., Hoeppner, B. B., Vilsaint, C. L., & White, W. L. (2017). Prevalence and pathways of recovery from drug and alcohol problems in the United States population: Implications for practice, research, and policy. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 181(Supplement C), 162-169. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2017.09.028
