Measuring different aspects of problem drug use: methodological developments

An understanding of the extent of drug use and its impact on different aspects of society is key to the development of appropriate policies for tackling the problem and monitoring the impact of interventions and services. However, the illegal nature of drug use and supply makes the use of traditional approaches to estimating the extent of the problems inappropriate; for example, the most problematic users lead chaotic lives so that they are unlikely to be represented in the household surveys which provide a measure of drug use in the general population. The Updated Drug Strategy 2002 drew on the information sources that were available at the time. However, these had limitations in terms of their coverage, the time periods covered and their ability to provide any local level information.

Therefore a programme of research was commenced to address these information limitations and a number of feasibility studies investigated alternative methods for measuring the size of the drug use problem from different perspectives. A number of reports have therefore been published that consider suitable estimation methods and give estimates of the number of problematic drug users, the size of the market for illicit drugs and the economic and social costs of class A drug use.

These studies provided estimates which were the best available at the time, but they were conceived as a starting point for further developments and hence also identified a number of ways in which they needed to be improved.