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

药物滥用给社会、社区和家庭造成严重问题，并造成巨大的经济代价。联合王国政府的估计表明，2000年期间，仅在英格兰和威尔士就有90亿至150亿英镑，2003/04年期间可能高达160亿英镑。其中大部分费用与估计33万人有关，他们有海洛因和快克等严重的吸毒成瘾问题。最新的经济估计（2003/04年）表明，这些人占总成本的99%，他们的犯罪占他们产生的成本的90%。药物滥用也是15-34岁人群的第三大常见死因，主要是因为海洛因等药物过量。很多纳税人？为解决这些问题花费了资金，但对吸毒者人数和相关问题的估计并没有经常或一贯地提供，以帮助各国政府作出最佳政策选择，而且很难确定这些估计的确定程度，因为它们涉及不同的时期。我们的研究将联合收割机，然后比较，关于严重毒品问题的不同种类的信息，以更准确地了解有多少人参与，有多少人参与犯罪，死亡比例是多少，以及治疗在减少死亡和犯罪方面有多大帮助。我们不再仅仅依靠人们对自己罪行的记忆，这是过去研究所采用的方法，我们将使用治疗记录和犯罪记录来确切了解他们被捕的时间，以及他们在接受治疗时是否发生了任何罪行。我们将使用类似的方法来查看死亡登记。我们将使用统计分析来改善对有多少人有严重的毒品问题的估计，了解这些人中是否有更多人死亡，以及原因是什么，并发现这个问题是否在某些地区比其他地区更严重。使用先进的统计技术，我们将检查有关药物滥用的所有可用信息来源，并将这些信息放在一起，以测试它们是否一致，找出为什么会出现不一致，并调整估计以考虑我们发现的任何不一致。我们的研究结果将为政府提供更准确的估计，以帮助政府决定如何处理毒品问题和如何明智地使用公共资金。

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.