Why do some people seem compelled to experiment and others live their entire lives without ever taking a single puff, snort, sniff, or dose of an illicit substance?

Thanks to decades of social studies, we now know that a person’s genes, mental health, and socioeconomic status can all affect his or her chance of using drugs – but what about religion? We’ve analyzed data from two nationally representative surveys to explore how religious beliefs – or a lack thereof – influence drug-taking.

To begin our journey through drugs and devotion, let’s compare religiosity and drug use across all 50 states plus Washington, D.C. If there is a connection between religious belief and substance abuse, we would expect to see clear differences between places that have very high and very low levels of religiosity.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health is conducted once a year to track how people across the country have been using drugs. Alongside the questions about illicit drugs and alcohol, the survey – which includes about 70,000 respondents – also asks a host of questions on topics like well-being, education, and employment. The identifying statement we used to derive the data represented in graphs 1, 2 and 3 is “My religious beliefs are very important.” If a respondent strongly agreed with that statement, we classed them as religious. If they strongly disagreed, we classed them as nonreligious. We were then able to compare lots of other variables against the religious and nonreligious groups, such as the one above: past year use of various drugs.

Graph 1 shows the past year rates (red and blue lines) on the right Y-axis and the difference between the religious and nonreligious rates (purple bars). Right away, we can see that across all substances, the nonreligious group has higher past year usage rates. But the gaps between the rates differ a lot depending on the drug type. Cigarettes and alcohol (the two legal substances) show the smallest gaps. 59.8% of the religious group consumed alcohol in the previous year, compared with 77.4% of the nonreligious group, and 19% of the religious group smoked cigarettes, versus 36.2% of the nonreligious group. These gaps, while significant, pale in comparison to the substances at the other end of the chart, like LSD, which was used by 1.2% of the nonreligious group, but only 0.1% of the religious group (12 times less). Across all illicit drugs, the nonreligious respondents had a past year usage rate that was almost three times higher than the religious respondents.

We now know that, on average, people who are religious take drugs less often than people who aren’t. See Graph 2.
 
We’ve added more evidence to the theory that religion influences drug-taking, but we still don’t know what component of religious beliefs orient people away from illicit substances. Is it time spent at church, the doctrine itself, or some other aspect of faith? To find out more, we compared the religious and nonreligious groups across nine other questions.

The results in Graph 3 indicate that nonreligious individuals are twice as likely as the religious to say they “get a real kick out of doing dangerous things” and “like to test themselves by taking risks.” These risks don’t necessarily include taking drugs (although we do know they do more of that), but they do include not wearing a seat belt while driving: 2.9% of the nonreligious group admitted to this reckless act, compared with 1.2% of the religious.

People who say their religious beliefs are very important are also significantly less likely to have ever sold an illegal drug, or have been expelled from school for using or selling drugs. More interesting than that, though, is that nonbelievers say they are almost twice as likely as believers to have been approached by someone selling drugs in the last year.

For more on this subject go to: https://drugabuse.com/featured/drugs-and-devotion/
 
Sources

• National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2013 and 2014
• Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth (8th- and 10th-Grade Surveys), 2014
• Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth (12th-Grade Surveys), 2014
• Religiosity and exposure to users in explaining illicit drug use among emerging adults, Journal of Religion and Health ---
  
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23114835ph 2
  

Graph 2

Graph 3