Year by year the usage of drugs has been increasing. Regardless of the age considerations, the usage has been improved. Many people are using different types of drugs for recreational purposes. The illicit usage may lead to addiction and in those cases, treatment is needed. The treatment centers are increasing and the number of people who attend the treatment programs are also increasing.
According to National Survey of Drug And Health(NSDUH), during the year 2008, 7.6 million people aged above 12 were treated for illicit drug usage, which is nearly 3.0% of the total population. During the past year, 1.2 million people, i.e., 0.5% of the total population and 16% of the people needed treatment took the treatment under the specialty facility for an illicit drug use problem. Remaining 6.4 million people did not receive the treatment. The statistics for the years 2007 and 2008 were almost same. When compared to the year 2002 the illicit drug usage has been decreased and the decrement is 0.3%.
Out of people who did not receive the treatment some said that they had put efforts for the treatment, but some of them said that they had not put any efforts to get treated.
Now coming to the statistics of youth, aged between 12 and 17, there were altogether 1.2 million people i.e. Around 4.8% people in need of the treatment for the illicit drugs usage in the year 2008. But out of this, only 111,000 received treatment under the specialty facility which is around 9.3% of the youth need treatment aged between 12 and 17. The rest 1.1 million youth did not receive treatment under specialty facility.
The people who did not take the treatment said so many reasons like not ready to stop using, no health coverage and cannot afford the cost of the treatment.