Humanizing Addiction
_Survey - Population Perspective_
In our survey-based research, we asked the participants’ name, majority, and political position. from the results, we notice that almost half of people think professional help like rehab is the most helpful way to help addictive. Also, more than half of people think criminalization is the worst way to deal with drug use. From our research results, we can see that although most people believe that criminalize drug users is an incorrect choice, many people still do not know how to treat drug abusers reasonably. Therefore, education about drugs is very important. People should know clearly about the harm that drug addiction will bring to themselves and their families.
These are the data we collected from our survey about how people in the United States viewed drug and addictive. We've collected answers from 101 participants. Some of the questions are optional.
The first question in our survey is asking ages of participants. From the results we can see that the majority of participants are 51+ years old, 35-50 years old, and 18-24 years old. We tried to cover almost all different aged to see a more collective results
This question gathered political position our participants hold. The majority (top 3) political position is Moderate, Conservative, and Progressive. Moderate participants is the most popular position among our participants, occupying 36.6%.
This optional question asked people about whether they have any personal or interpersonal use of drug. The results shows that among 81 responses, there are 27 participants indicated that neither themselves nor people they know used drug. 11 participants indicated that people around them have used drugs. 20 participants indicated that they've used drugs themselves. 12 participants indicated that both people around them and themselves have used drugs.
The results from this question showed that in general, people believe that addictive use drug because of Escapism and self-medication.
From this question, we know that almost a half of the participants would try to help addictive via professional help (rehab). Also, 23.8% participants would try to help addictive by themselves. We also can see that a nontrivial number of people would just ignore addictive because they think it is none of their business.
The results of this question showed that there are more than half of the (50.5%) participants strongly disagree that criminalization is the best way to deal with drug use. Less than 10% of participants think criminalization would be good for prevent drug use. People started to realize that criminalization might not be the best way.
Almost half of the participants(45.5%) strongly disagree that strict drug policy cuts usage and a large amount of people (31.7%) somehow disagree strict drug policy cuts usage. Less than 10% of participants think strict policy would prevent drug use.
From the results of this question, a large amount of participants (68.3%) strongly disagree that addictive are below "normal person". The majority of general public is opposing the dominant narrative that treated drug users as "inferior".
The largest amount of participants (35.6%) strongly agree that substance use ought to be treated medically. However, there are still 26.7% of participants stand in neutral about would medical treatment be the best way to treat substance use. Compared to previous questions, there are a nontrivial amount of participants strongly disagree that substance use ought to be treated medically. We can see that people still are not very sure about or lack of knowledge about how to treated substance use correctly and scientifically.
From the questions that we asked for any elaboration on drug use, there are 28 responses in total. We can see that many people reply to this question demonstrate their realization that drug use should be treated in a better way but they are still lack of knowledge about how to do that.