FiveThirtyEight’s New Hampshire Diary

When Nate, Jody, and I were driving home from a Hillary Clinton town hall meeting yesterday evening, we took our exit off I-93, drove up the slight incline of the exit ramp to a red light, and at the top, as the buildings across the street came into view, we saw a large screen with bright white letters that said “Heroin dealers.” As we stared in puzzlement, the screen switched to the next frame: “Shitheads!!” It was an advertisement for a local political campaign, and the politician in question was running on the issue of New Hampshire’s drug problem. We’ve heard a lot about drug abuse in the state over the past few days. In last night’s debate, Republican candidates were asked how serious they are about addressing drug use (in New Hampshire and the country as a whole) and a statistic was cited: 48 percent of people in New Hampshire know somebody who has abused heroin. Clinton cited that same statistic, which comes from a local ABC affiliate poll, in yesterday’s town hall. Ted Cruz held a town hall the day before yesterday, where an audience member asked him about pain-killer abuse and whether he would do anything to curb the ability of pharmaceutical companies to market their drugs to doctors and hospitals. To try to get a sense of how New Hampshire’s drug problem compares to that of other states, I looked up some data from the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. When it comes to drug use among all adults, New Hampshire ranks in the top ten; but when it comes to drug use among 18- to 25-year-olds, the state is a marked outlier: