Since its inception in 1992, Pulse Check: Trends in Drug Abuse has been published either quarterly or semi-annually by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Its purpose is to describe trends in drug abuse as they develop before population-based, long-term research is available to policy makers and researchers. Pulse Check uses reports from ethnographers and epidemiologists, law enforcement officials, and treatment providers, all working in the fields of drug use and abuse, to create a snapshot of the current state of drug abuse nationwide. Information gathered from each source is summarized in narrative form, followed by tables detailing the findings. At the end of this issue, a special report is included on recent trends in what is termed "club" and "cafeteria" drug use.
Dr. Dana Hunt, Ms. Anna Nelson, and the staff of Abt Associates Inc produce the Pulse Check for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Anne McDonald Pritchett, Office of Programs, Budget, Research, and Evaluation, ONDCP, serves as the project director and editor for Pulse Check. The ethnographic, law enforcement, and treatment provider information in this issue is drawn from telephone conversations about local trends occurring from January 1998 to June 1998, the period following the last Pulse Check. Abt Associates staff gathered information from ethnographers, epidemiologists, and law enforcement officials selected on the basis of their expertise and to provide geographic representation. To the extent possible, these sources remain the same throughout each issue of the Pulse Check, and, in fact, many have been consistently reporting since 1992. For each issue of Pulse Check, treatment providers are randomly selected from the Uniform Facility Data Set, a national directory of treatment programs, to represent four different geographic regions of the country. The appendix provides a more detailed description of the methodology used in the production of Pulse Check and a list of sources.
