Drug Vibes is an annual web survey, organised by
Sciensano's drugs unit,
which investigates characteristics of people aged 18 and older who use drugs.
The survey asks people who currently use drugs about their habits around their consumption, as well as their mental health and socio-demographic characteristics. It focuses particularly on the use of:
Cannabis, (Powder) cocaine, Ecstasy/MDMA, Amphetamines, Ketamine
Participants are mainly recruited through ads on Facebook and Instagram. They therefore constitute a convenience sample,
meaning that they
are not representative of the whole population of people who use drugs.
Drug Vibes meets the European Web Survey on Drugs (EWSD)
In 2024, the web survey was conducted as part of a European-wide project :
the European Web Survey on Drugs,
a web survey conducted in 35 countries, from the EU and beyond, in coordinated by
.
The third tab of this dashboard displays a selection of the results
of this survey, using the answers of people who indicated that they live in Belgium.
The structure of this survey is similar to Drug Vibes', with many questions in common.
However, the surveys have substantial differences, which makes direct comparison of these results ill-advised:
- Drug Vibes focuses on drug use in the past month, whereas the EWSD focuses on use in the past year. There is therefore a meaningful difference between the analysis population of both studies.
- A number of questions were asked differently in both studies (e.g. questions with different answer options, like the questions about the motivations, settings of use, or purchase channels).
The studies, although similar, should therefore be considered and analysed
separately.
Contents
The second tab of this dashboard enables the investigation of the results from the waves 2022, 2023 and 2025 of Drug Vibes, while the third tab contains results from the 2024 wave of the EWSD — limited to the Belgian respondents.
For each survey, different sections contain results relating to different topics.
The sample section contains information about the
whole group of respondents to the survey. The other sections focus
on a specific substance and describe aspects of their consumption
by the people who indicated that they used them in the
last month (for the Drug Vibes survey) or in the
last year for the EWSD.
How to navigate this dashboard?
- In each tab you can choose to visualise data in a graphic view or in table view.
- You can choose to compare or filter the data based on region, age group, sex or year of the survey and sometimes substance.
- Be careful when comparing groups or selecting subcategories of people, as the sample size can become very small. These small sample size groups (<50) are not displayed in the graphs but remain visible in the tables. Please interpret results from such small groups with caution.
- The table view allows you also to download the data in Excel (full dataset or specific selection)
- For every graph, you can save it as a picture, print it or display the underlying data behind by using this button