The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on July 27, 2026. According to SAMHSA's news release (SAMHSA, SAMHSA Releases Annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health, July 27, 2026):
"The 2025 NSDUH provides a national snapshot of behavioral health in the United States based on self-reported responses from more than 60,000 people. A key focus of the annual report released today is examining trends in substance use and mental health among the U.S. population from 2021 to 2025."
Kastalia Medrano writing in Filter (Kastalia Medrano, SAMHSA Reframes National Drug Use Survey, Leaves Fentanyl Problem Intact, Filter, Aug. 4, 2026) notes that this 5-year framing actually obscures some meaningful data. She writes:
"This time the annual-ish behavioral health survey is framed as a five-year trend report covering 2021 to 2025, which somewhat compounds the preexisting barriers to gleaning anything useful from it.
"The survey covers mental illness, substance use, treatment and recovery for respondents ages 12 and up. The 2025 NSDUH, published in late July, reflects 60,447 completed interviews in person or online; in recent years it’s typically reached around 70,000.
"Based on the 2025 respondents, SAMHSA projects that 69.8 million people—around 24 percent of the population over age 12—used at least one unregulated drug at least once within the past year. This refers to marijuana, hallucinogens, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and “misused” prescription opioids, stimulants or tranquilizers/sedatives.
"The 2022 NSDUH was the first to include street fentanyl. But it instituted a weirdly nonintuitive format that keeps street fentanyl siloed from the main section on opioids—effectively framing it as an afterthought while keeping the focus on prescription analgesics and heroin."
She further notes:
"The NSDUH is pretty much the gold-standard citation for statistics on SUD and drugs, but the survey has always been marked by awkward data taxonomies that skew the results further away from real life than they would have been already. And by ambiguous language that makes it difficult to interpret even the more straightforward parts. After respondents “who reported ever using heroin or prescription pain relievers” were asked whether they’d been prescribed medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), for example, and shown a comprehensive and accurate list of different formulations of methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone, the report proceeds to state that MOUD “do not include the use of medications that are prescribed to manage withdrawal symptoms.”
"The survey purports to represent the national scope of drug use and mental illness, but barely acknowledges that it isn’t offered to the populations most impacted by those things. It isn’t offered to people living outside or in their cars, for example, or in jail or prison."