This is a voluntary national data collection system that gathers information on substance abuse that results in visits to hospital emergency departments (ED) in the contiguous United States. Hospitals tracked in the DAWN system include non federal, short-stay, general hospitals that have twenty-four-hour ED—representative of the coterminous United States as a whole—plus a sample of hospitals in twenty-one major metropolitan areas. The system also collects data on drug-related deaths from a non random sample of medical examiners. Such data are published annually in separate reports titled DAWN Medical Examiner Data.

The data collected by the DAWN system represent one of the most widely used national indicators of drug abuse—frequently used by researchers and policymakers to determine the nature and extent of medical consequences of drug use nationally and in the participating metropolitan areas. Although the data are...