Becoming a Statistic part 2

Another window into the world of drug abuse is through the workplace. Drug tests are often mandated at trucking companies and pharmacies, where on-the-job drug abuse is particularly dangerous to the public. In August, the Office of National Drug Policy released a report showing a 15.9% decline in the number of positive drug tests for cocaine among the U.S. workforce during the first six months of 2007 compared with 2006. But how accurate are these numbers? Workplace drug tests can't catch all drug abuse. The tests have a fleeting detection period — drugs must be consumed within the last few days or even hours for positive results, according to Dr. Barry Sample, Director of Science and Technology for the Employer Solutions Division at Quest Diagnostics, a workplace drug-testing company.
Now researchers at Oregon State University are taking a new approach to assessing drug use that could potentially transform the government's understanding of America's drug problem. In small samples taken from untreated community sewage plants in six major cities, lead researcher Jennifer Field has been identifying and analyzing chemicals the body produces after breaking down substances like marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin. This method, first used by Italian scientists to gauge regional cocaine use, allows researchers to analyze data within hours, tracking drug use, not over a year's time using aggregated national data, but over a few days' time within a small, defined region. The window of detection is short here too, but if samples are taken frequently enough, you get a long-exposure image of a community's drug habits. Though the science is still relatively new, Field says she hopes to begin working with local police to test the method's accuracy.
But even if such testing proves reliable, drug officials must still grapple with society's changing perception of what constitutes a drug and what constitutes abuse. The Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services work together to rank drugs like ecstasy, aspirin and cocaine on a scale of five schedules, or classifications. Cocaine, for instance, is categorized as a "Schedule II" drug because of its medical use as a local anesthetic. (Other Schedule II drugs include morphine, which also poses a high risk for abuse but is recognized as medically useful. Schedule I drugs, like heroin, are considered the most dangerous of all substances.)
Robert Yancey, a program director at a New York City drug clinic called Turning Point, blames the dangerously lax attitude toward cocaine in the 1970s for fueling the drug's popularity — and fostering the crack epidemic of the 1980s. One law enforcement official in Philadelphia says a contemporary analogy is the growing abuse of prescription painkillers, which now ranks second — behind marijuana use — as the nation's most prevalent illegal drug problem, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But in tracking drugs like OxyContin, also known as "hillbilly heroin," officials must first distinguish drug abuse from mere "medical misuse," Compton says. Officials actually had to modify the NSDUH survey after realizing that some methamphetamine users failed to report using the drug because they were taking it with a prescription.
Next year, the federal government will spend more than $12 billion to battle the use and availability of illicit drugs. The fight involves the work of 11 federal agencies, including the State Department, the Justice Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security. But for all the complexities that come with fighting such a stubborn plague as substance abuse, recovering drug users like Olmo say surveys and statistics can't capture the all-consuming despair of addiction. The war on drugs, he says, "is all about the numbers and money." We're at least now trying to do something about the numbers.

?Becoming a Statistic part 2Originally from: http://www.nursinglink.monster.com/news/articles/13988-becoming-a-statistic-part-2

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