Inside the National Survey on Drug Use and Health So this guy shows up at my house saying my address had been randomly selected for a paid survey. I get a quick interview to see if I qualify for the survey, and this is just to basically confirm my age as being over 18 and under 30.
The survey is from the United States Public Health Service and is being executed by the Research Triangle Institute. It is for the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health and takes about an hour to finish. When complete, you get 30$. I don't know how my address was randomly selected, but I am in a pretty good part of town for whatever that counts.
The interesting part to this story deals with the type of questions in the survey. The bulk of the mental health section asked if you were or had ever been depressed, anxious, nervous, etc. The bulk of the drug use section asked if you had taken x drug, and if so, at what age and how often.
The marijuana questions were more numerous than the other drugs. Most of the questions dealt with if you used, when you used, when you stopped using, how often you used, etc. It featured questions like:
"How do you feel about occasional marijuana usage by adults?"
- Strongly Disapprove
- Disapprove
- Neither approve nor disapprove
As you can tell, there was a definite bias in the questions. Directly after this were questions about your spirituality and belief in God, then your mental health.
I'm not someone who smokes pot. I don't, I haven't in years, I won't ever return to it, and I'm not an advocate of its usage. I'll even discourage its usage. But, I'd do the same for tobacco, alcohol, or any other drug. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I own no foil hats and I don't think the government is evil. I am for personal privacy and I believe marijuana is a lesser evil than alcohol and tobacco based on usage-related deaths alone. I'm wholly against what I feel are harder drugs, including mushrooms. Now that you know my position, I'll tell you my honest and mostly unbiased feelings about the survey.
I got the definite feeling that this survey is going to link sanity and happiness to a persons' spirituality and drug habits. I haven't seen the 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health to confirm, but this really seemed to link the belief in god to the usage of drugs and resulting depression. It also seemed to disallow positive connotations of light drug use. You could never approve of an action that was illegal (like adult marijuana smoking), but you could strongly disapprove or disapprove. It asked silly questions, like "Have you ever felt depressed," which almost certainly can be used to confuse any relevant statistics.
Having said that, much or most of the survey was definitely statistical, and the majority of the drug questions were about tobacco usage. It asked how harmful I thought smoking and drinking were when done once a week, a couple of times a week, or every day. It was measuring how uninformed or ignorant consumers are, but I believe the way the test was set up will make that problem out to be worse than it really is. I do think, however, this survey is going to be a biased piece of propaganda, and I'm not one of those persons who has really cared in the past. That's the genuine opinion from a regular guy.
At any rate, I'm 30$ richer.
-- by Marco
12:08:46 AM 
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