CEWG was established by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and has functioned as an early warning system, predicting drug abuse patterns and trends. The 21-member CEWG team correctly predicted the epidemics of crack cocaine and the recent "club drug" phenomenon. The 2003 meeting included a panel discussion on the emerging problem of methadone-associated mortality; presentations on the status of the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ's) Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program and the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA's) National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS); an update by staff on the status of the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN); presentations on drug abuse in Missouri; and presentations on status and data produced by the surveillance systems in Mexico and Canada. The CEWG draw on a number of data sources for their work, include emergency room drug mentions data; drug-related mortality data; substance abuse treatment admissions data; arrestee drug-testing data; forensic drug laboratory data; and drug seizure, trafficking, price, and purity data. Current findings from CEWG indicate that polysubstance abuse is becoming a major problem across all CEWG areas. The ingestion of multiple drugs at one time is contributing to a rise in health problems and deaths. According to data on patterns and trends in drug abuse across CEWG areas, 74 percent of marijuana mentions represented multidrug episodes, as did 71 percent of cocaine mentions, 54 percent of methamphetamine mentions, and 53 percent of heroin mentions. A full 94 percent of narcotic analgesic death mentions in CEWG areas involved more than one drug. Next, the report turns to trend analyses of each of the following drugs: methamphetamine, marijuana, cocaine/crack, heroin, other opiates/narcotics, phencyclidine (PCP), club drugs, benzodiazepines, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Finally, officials in Canada and Mexico adopted the CEWG model to monitor drug abuse trends; the report presents findings from their efforts. Both sets of findings indicate that marijuana is the most prevalent drug of abuse on both Canada and Mexico. United States data presented at the CEWG meeting indicate new populations of methamphetamine users and high levels of marijuana use among adolescents and young adults. Exhibits