One of the goals we aim to keep is to appeal to the black market end users. The mechanism for us to attract those users is our reporting of accurate drug prices. In our case, it kinda makes no sense asking or reporting the price unless we have more info such as quality and/or quantity about the substance. Assuming the user remembers the price/quality/quantity, the next natural thing to ask them to describe their experience would be the date. Call it a receipt for a transaction if you will, only this receipt doesn't include your IP..
Searching for this black market information I've found that in order to keep the data accurate* and as up-to-date as possible, there is a need to protect against spamming and just inaccurate or out-dated data. So we not only want to appeal to black market end users, we want to appeal to the
most recently active end users. To achieve this consistency, the safety mechanism is lots of people taking the survey and answering truthfully. Allowing users to post data (which includes prices) for a range of dates would severely affect the consistency since this weighs their receipt much heavier
Next I think the survey should forego asking about the date it was used (especially if it's everyday or has been used very frequently) because it doesn't seem of any use and instead ask how many times the person has used that drug (maybe in the past week, month, year, lifetime, etc) because it allows for MUCH more information per usage. There's just no way for one to enter that they use marijuana, for example, everyday and that they use it 3 times per day at a .5g dose without filling out a form 365 times for 2009 choosing each day in succession.
Perhaps after explaining about the accurate prices ordeal, this seems clearer. While the 3 times a day would affect the 'number of uses', the prices will remain unchanged since the .5g dose was likely not bought as a .5g dose. If you notice, we don't report statistics on doses unless they have an accompanying price.
Furthermore, it should be allowed, when inputting dosages, to put in "20 mg" as their dose for example, using a text box for the number and a list box to select g, mg, ml, mcg, etc. It would be limiting, for example, to have grams as the only choice for marijuana or mg only for ketamine.
This is true it is limiting, but only because there is a limited or discrete number of ways to describe the quantity involved in mention. For example - marijuana usually gets used by the gram. Same goes for chocolate which is most likely either grams, OZ, mL, or L.
Also, with regard to quality, it would make sense for every drug to have low, medium low, medium, medium high, high, rather than have anything specific to any drug.
In my opinion, the most important modifications to the survey site would be:
1. To start the survey with the user choosing their location and drugs used they'd like to report on and then the program going through each individually in order
Ah ah, this depends on your definition of drug. If you look at what a drug is, really it's just a chemical agent that affects living things. The quality is probably most related to the structure of the drug and since drugs come in all forms, it is considerably hard to determine the quality. Most of the time we just go with what we know, but this becomes much harder to assess when you talk about black market drugs such as salvia, cocaine, lsd, ecstasy, and even white market drugs such as chocolate. Something like alcohol can be categorized into a "low, mid, high" hierarchy because it is universally known that alcohol is either
-poor man's beer ...i.e- natty
-plastic bottle vodka - for the tough our there
-high end wine or grey goose vodka, etc, etc
The types of alcohol (liquor, wine, beer) is somewhat deducible from the standard sizes though this is limited with our representation.
I appreciate all your comments. I think it is a really good idea to have the user perhaps select the substances for which they would like to submit data before doing anything else. This is way more user friendly to someone who just visited DopeStats. This can also increase the amount of data collected. I hope you understand why this exhaustive approach is implemented. Here are some good articles I think will help understand where society currently is in terms of collecting statistics and data about drug use:
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_article1.shtml
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_article1.shtml
