Challenge: The Global Drug Survey is the world’s largest online survey of drug use. Each year, the survey is typically completed by more than 100,000 respondents, resulting in large multi-year data sets. A major challenge is making this data readily available for researchers from across the world to access, in a secure and governed way, whilst allowing researchers to utilise their analytical software of choice.

Data: The Global Drug Survey data consists of multi-year cross-sectional data sets with more than 1500 variables captured per year provided in 10 different languages. This includes special issue data sets, such as our COVID-19 Special Edition, and special question-set modules, such as drink spiking or no/low alcohol consumption, changes in drug use behaviour given changes in country-level policies and laws, harms from identified new or emerging drugs, perceptions around drug checking and many more. To date, there are almost one million respondents.

 Solution: The Secure eResearch Platform provides a go-to solution for the Global Drug Survey. It provides the required scalable data governance and secure data analysis environment to meet data custodians’ requirements and support researchers from around the world.