The latest tracking data of substance abuse amongst college athletes is out, surveying some 20,474 NCAA student-athletes across 23 sports across some 1,076 campuses nationwide.

The random sample that was collected represented approximately 15 percent of all NCAA teams.

In some sports, the numbers are astonishing. While you may be reading about the high alcohol use averages in the game of lacrosse (some 95 percent of men and 85 percent of women players report having had an alcoholic beverage in the 12-month period of the survey date, there is another trend that should be of concern to frequent readers of this site.

Of all women’s NCAA championship sports, field hockey players report the highest percentage of use in the previous 12 months — some 35.7 percent. This compares to women’s lacrosse (30 percent) and women’s soccer (22.8 percent).

The table of social drug use for women’s sports shows varying use of six substances, but there is one notable decline over the last four years: alcohol amongst women’s lacrosse players. In 2005, 92.8 percent of those surveyed reported using alcohol over the last year. Four years later, it was 84.7 percent.

While this makes you wonder if an emphasis on fitness is a reason, it doesn’t explain the simultaneous rise in field hockey players (86.6 to 94.2 percent) and in women’s soccer players (83.6 to 85.7 percent).

I’m not one to moralize on what people can put in their own bodies, but these kinds of trends are ones to watch when it comes to what is happening in our society at large. In many places worldwide, marijuana is now a decriminalized drug which is regulated and taxed.

The one thing is, I’m not sure that in this country, I’d want to be in a car traveling on the same road where a person under the influence of marijuana is coming at me in the other direction. It’s a traffic-safety nightmare in the making.