To be sure, there are isolated examples of integration across multiple drug data sources to characterize individual metropolitan areas. There has also been creative use of census data, treatment admissions data, and mortality data in an attempt to apply NHSDA results to a “small area estimation” task (e.g., see Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, 1997). There is, however, no systematic and continuing effort to perform data syntheses in a manner that could help the sum of the parts supply more information than can be extracted from each data source analyzed independently.

The committee does not take a position on the many complex and difficult issues that would almost certainly be involved in effectively linking different datasets on illegal drugs. While we do not make formal recommendations, in our judgment the feasibility of linking the national drug use surveys with other databases warrants serious investigation. With respect to analyses of already-gathered data, a mechanism could be created to allow investigators to discover the serendipitous overlap in