Introduction
The Los Angeles metropolitan region embodies the second largest city in the United States. In geographical terms, Los Angeles has long been considered a prominent "world city" and a "gateway" to the rest of the country. Its status as a major port, and a disinvestment in the central city, have led to a significant drug abuse problem in Los Angeles. This report attempts to ‘map’ that drug problem, looking for patterns and anomalies in its spatial distribution. It stops short of proposing action for the future, simply because the substance abuse problem of a city this large cannot be adequately addressed through a GIS analysis.
The goals of this project are twofold. First, we attempt to examine and map the spatial distribution of drug abuse. This is done through the analysis of statistical data pertaining to a) drug-related crimes, and b) drug treatment facilities. These two sets of information were available at very different scales. Statistics on drug-related crimes were available only for the City of Los Angeles proper, and organized at the police community level, while the drug treatment facilities we examined were distributed throughout the entire County of Los Angeles and organized into larger, regional Service Planning Areas (SPAs).
Secondly, we aim to correlate the spatial distribution of substance abuse to the variable of income. This spatial data was collected at the census block group level from 2000 US census statistics. Media and ethnographies have shown that substance abuse is not confined to lower socioeconomic classes. There exists among middle- and upper-class citizens a ‘hidden population’ of drug users that is not proportionally represented in the popular imagination. It was our hope that GIS analysis would reveal this ‘hidden population’ and destabilize popular myths about the socioeconomic identities of drug users.
After considering attempts to correlate drug abuse to other indicators such as race, education, employment status, and household status, we chose to limit our comparison to the variable of median household income, in light of the salient connections that could be made.