Is anyone interested in the epidemiology of marijuana abuse and dependence?

[Taylor M]

Lately I've been pretty bored with my work. I am a manager at a small academic survey research firm, and what we work on is pretty market driven. It's good, worthwhile research but it's usually low budget, local, and it's very rarely on the topics that I am most interested in. Variety is good, but even that can get tiring if you have no choice in what you're doing.

I've been feeling the urge to write about something I really care about more and moreover the pat few months. I've started preliminary work on a project, and I have no idea whatsoever where it will end up. It could be a conference paper, a journal article, or a graduate thesis. I just know at this point I want to write something on the topic, and I should start with basic descriptives first.

The data I want to work with is from a study called The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, or NSDUH. There is already a report written on the latest available data (2006), but as large as it is it leaves plenty of room for academic research. In the area of marijuana abuse or dependence it lists one prevalence for both, and there is not much descriptive information on who these people are. I've looked for prior articles by SAMHSA and others but there's not much there. I think that's a damn shame, because this is top-class, cutting edge data. US taxpayers pay about 10 billion US dollars a decade for this data, and while it is used by the government far, far too few people in academia work on it. It's free, anybody can download it and work on it if they have the skills and patience.

I'd like to write a short report in the kind of detail that this data deserves. I'd go over various risk factors, demographics, and health out comes, along with some probably conservative estimates of how much marijuana is purchased. I'd like to post here because I don't really have an outlet, and because if I did I'd need to do that and then take it a step further. I think if I just post it to some other, more general place I'd get drowned in a sea of potheads who have bought into pro-legalization propaganda. I've posted my opinions elsewhere and had my own struggle with marijuana flat out denied, belittled and minimized, and I don't need that while I'm trying to just get this stuff out! I need to run it past a friendly audience, and I was wondering if there was any interest here.

The latest NSDUH report is here:
http://oas.samhsa.gov/nsduhLatest.htm

Data is here for download or analysis online:
http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/SAMHDA/DAS3/00064.xml

I need to recode some of the data, especially the marijuana purchase data (it's in 4 different variables depending whether they answered in grams, ounces or pounds), so I will be using SPSS or SAS to analyze it. The online analysis can be fun, but jump to conclusions at your own risk. I'm a part time grad student in a public health program and I have a fair amount of experience working with data, but I'll probably make a few mistakes.

[Donald Todd Quinn]

Hello Taylor,
How's the research coming along? Can you update us on your progress?