Incidence, prevalence, harms and intervention effects for problem and injecting drug use: crime, morbidity & mortality

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Drug misuse causes severe problems for society, communities, and families and incurs huge economic costs. UK Government estimates suggest somewhere between #9 and #15 billion, in England and Wales alone, during 2000, and perhaps up to #16 billion during 2003/04. Most of this cost related to an estimated 330,000 people who had very severe problems with addiction to drugs like heroin and crack. The most recent economic estimates (2003/04) suggest that these people accounted for 99% of the total cost and that their crime accounted for 90% of the costs they generated. Drug misuse is also the third most common cause of death for people aged 15-34, mainly because of overdose from drugs like heroin. A lot of taxpayers? money is spent in trying to address these problems, but estimates of the number of drug users and associated problems have not been routinely or consistently available to help governments to make the best policy choices and it is difficult to be sure how certain the estimates are, because they relate to different time-periods. Our research will combine, and then compare, different sorts of information about serious drug problems to get a more exact idea of how many people are involved, how many get involved in crime, what proportion die, and how helpful treatment has been in reducing death and crime. Instead of just relying on how well people can remember their crimes, which is the approach that research studies have taken in the past, we will use treatment records and criminal records to see exactly when they were arrested and if any crimes happened while they being treated, or not. We will use a similar approach to look at death registrations. We will use statistical analysis to improve estimates of how many people have had severe drug problems, to learn whether more of these have died, and from what causes, and to discover whether this problem is worse in some areas than others. Using advanced statistical techniques, we will examine all of the available sources of information about drug misuse and bring these together to test whether they are consistent, to find out why inconsistencies occur, and to adjust the estimates to allow for any inconsistencies that we find. Our findings will provide the Government with much better estimates, to help to make decisions about how to deal with the drug problem and how to spend public money wisely.