Chapter 1: Description of the Report and the Survey

The 1997 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) is the 17^th in a series of studies designed to measure the prevalence and correlates of drug use in the United States and to monitor drug use trends over time. The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse sponsored the first two studies conducted in 1971 and 1972. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) sponsored the NHSDA from 1974 to 1991. In October 1992, responsibility for conducting the NHSDA and preparing reports was moved to the Office of Applied Studies (OAS) within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Three other volumes present data from the 1997 study:
 

• Preliminary Results from the 1997 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (OAS, 1998c). This monograph is a part of the NHSDA "H" series published by OAS/SAMHSA and reports in tabular, graphical, and narrative bullet formats some key findings on illicit drug use prevalence by age and major demographic variables in 1997, and relative to other years (1979, 1982, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996).2 The Preliminary Results report also provides specific results for marijuana and hashish, cocaine, other illicit drugs, alcohol, and tobacco by age and major demographic variables. Its technical appendices review the survey methodology, limitations of the data, other major data sources, and relevant references. This report is available from the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information (NCADI) and from the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO).
  
  
• National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Population Estimates 1997 (OAS, 1998b). This report also is a part of the NHSDA "H" series published by OAS/SAMHSA and provides estimates, based on the 1997 questionnaire, of the percentages and numbers of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population aged 12 or older who used illicit drugs, alcohol, and tobacco in their lifetime, in the past year, and in the past month. The Population Estimates report also contains information about needle use and the frequency of use of marijuana, cocaine, crack cocaine, inhalants, hallucinogens, psychotherapeutics, phencyclidine (PCP), heroin, cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and alcohol. Information is presented in tabular form with little or no explanatory text. This report also is available from NCADI and from the GPO.

• NHSDA 1997 Public Use File and Codebook (OAS, 1998e). The 1997 NHSDA public use file has been prepared for use with the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) or Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) as a SAS dataset. For each variable on the public use file, the codebook provides the SAS variable name, the interview instrumentation source, value codes and their meanings, and an unweighted univariate frequency distribution. The codebook also provides further technical documentationof the NHSDA survey methodology. The public use file and codebook are available from OAS/SAMHSA. The public use files from 1979 to 1996 are currently available on the World Wide Web (WWW) within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA) at the University of Michigan: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/SAMHDA/nsduh.html; the 1997 file soon will be available from this source.

2 Trend tables in this report excluded data on 1990 in order to add the new 1997 data. Trend tables in this Main Findings report also exclude 1990 data.