Drugs - Drug Users By Race And Ethnicity

"Most drug users are white." If you submit that phrase to the Google search engine on the Internet, you will get four pages of hits. In most cases, the phrase is prefaced by the words "Although" or "While" or "Even though" — and the phrase is then followed by words stating that blacks are more frequently arrested or imprisoned.

Most drug users are white. But then, also, most people in the United States are white. Therefore it is more pertinent to ask what proportion of each racial/ethnic group uses drugs — which is what the graphic of this panel shows. The data are from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as normalized using 2000 Census data from the Bureau of the Census. The underlying numbers, shown in the table below, are an annualized average for the years 1999 and 2000.

In this view, proportionally more whites used drugs "ever in their lifetime," but blacks used drugs more than whites when the occasion was stated as "in the past year" or "in the past month." During recent occasions (past year, last month), the differences between whites, blacks, and American Indians/Native Alaskans are fairly small when expressed as a percentage of the population aged 12 years old or older. Asians and Pacific Islanders are least involved with drugs. People of Hispanic origin trail whites, blacks, and American Indians.

These numbers show the prevalence of drugs in our society. Nearly 4 of 10 whites, fully a third of all blacks, 3 in 10 American Indians, and a quarter of all Hispanics have used drugs sometime in their lives. Use of illegal drugs is predominantly a youth/young adult phenomenon the two largest age groups are, in this order, 18 to 25 and 12 to 17. Therefore recent users are a smaller proportion of the 12-and-older group. Nonetheless, more than 1 of 10 among whites and blacks and nearly 1 of 10 among Hispanics reached for some kind of illegal drug in the last year. Asians, some of whose ancestors first introduced Americans to the pleasures of the opium den in the 19th century, seemed to have learned their lesson better. They are not using drugs at the same rates.

Actual numbers reported by SAMHSA are shown in the table:

Drug Use in Thousands, 12 and Older, 1999-2000 Annualized Average

Race/Ethnicity	Used Any Illicit Drug
		In Lifetime	In Past Year	In Past Month
White	67,807	18,411	10,231
Black	9,186	3,028	1,734
American Indian or Alaska Native	587	213	129
Asian/Pacific Islander	1,273	366	192
Hispanic Origin	6,791	2,335	1,266
Total	85,644	24,353	13,552

The table displays very large numbers: 13.6 million people in the age group used drugs in the months past (4.8% of this population), 24.4 million in the last year (8.8%), and 85.6 million in their lifetime (25.5%). This is not a small market.

We turn next to the second part of the allegation often seen in the papers and on activist web sites — namely that blacks are disproportionately punished for their indulgence in drugs.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, SAMHSA, Office of Applied Studies, National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 1999 and 2000.