Conclusion
At both the LAPD community and Service Planning Area levels of analysis, our findings would suggest that drug abuse is a problem of the poor. According to these statistics, there exists a moderate negative correlation between income and both drug-related arrests and drug treatment participants. These findings would reinforce popular stereotypes about the identity of drug abusers.
However, one cannot assume these inferences to be correct. This report demonstrates the severe limitations of GIS analysis in examining social problems like substance abuse. There is no single method that can accurately capture the total population of drug users. While our analysis chose to situate drug abuse through the spatial tracking of drug-related crimes and drug rehabilitation treatment, these represent only two methods, out of many, useful in identifying a broad social concern. Because of the specific problems outlined in earlier discussion, both of these methods tend to overrepresent those in lower socioeconomic classes. Our research was limited to analyzing only these two dimensions because other data was classified, unavailable, or nonexistent. Other possible dimensions of analysis could include mapping drug-related deaths, tracking hospitalizations, polling and sampling, and ethnographies. As we have shown, the available dimensions of analysis lack statistical validity due to the modifiable areal unit problem, the agglomeration effect, and the inherent methods of data collection. With the public availability of more comprehensive information, GIS analysis would be better situated to deconstruct myths about the spatial distribution of drug abuse and to communicate a greater understanding of a profound social problem.