Background Research

 
Part I:

As background for my project I did research about the connection of drug-abuse and socio-economic factors. From the material I found, I decided that the "National Household Survey on drug abuse" of 1997 would be most useful for my purposes. Additionally, it offered relatively new research results. 
The National Household Survey on drug abuse is a study that was developed for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Office of Applied Studies (OAS), by the Research Triangle Institute (RTI). The data was collected for all 216 Mio members of the society of the United States, which is a broad and reliable base for a study.
 

This Study presents tables showing the correlation between particular socio-economic data and drug-use:

I picked the factors age, gender, education and employment status for my project. 
Although the data refers to the United States, it should be generally valid, at least for a society that is culturally as close to the States as Canada is (although the Canadians keep negotiating that).

 
 
Part II: Market Analysis for Dealers

As there is (of course) no literature existing on which I could base my criteria choice, I did my own selection. My Market Analysis will be based on two criteria:

  1.  Number of Customers
  2.  Safety


I developed three factors in order to measure the criterium safety.

  •  Distance from Police stations

  • The closer one is to police stations, the more likely it is that you bumb into police men. Therefore one should avoid the closest area around police stations (constraint factor) and the farer one is away the better (distance factor).
  • 3. Proximity to Skytrain stations

  • The Skytrain offers a fast possibility to escape (especially as there is no driver and no ticket control). Therefore, one is safer, the closer one is to skytrain stations. 

 
 
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 1 .  Background Research
 2 .  Data Collection, Preparation, Manipulation
 3 .  Methodology
 4 .  Spatial Analysis
 5 .  Results & Discussion 
 6.   Problems & Errors