who does what?
The media sometimes seem to give the impression that just about everyone under the age of 30 is steadily getting more and more out of their heads. But what's the real picture? Chris Fitch and Peter Millson report
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The UK illegal drug market is a multi-billion-pound business. Figures from the British Crime Survey (BCS) 2000 suggest that 34% of all adults and 50% in the 16-24 agegroup have used an illegal drug at some point in their lives. Such figures put the UK at the top of European Union drug league tables.
the big picture
Although valuable for newspaper editors – and for comparisons over time – data on lifetime use doesn't tell us that much about people's patterns of drug taking, because much of it represents brief or one-off experiments. To get a clearer picture, 'last-year' and 'last-month' measures are used, and these produce much lower – and less sensational – figures. In the 16-59 agegroup, 11% report use of an illegal drug in the last year and 6% in the last month. (For the sake of focus and digestibility, this article uses figures gathered by the BCS, which covers England and Wales, and Department of Health figures for English schoolchildren. Separate figures are available for the rest of the UK – see help and info.)
Not surprisingly, surveys suggest that young people take more drugs than older people do. For instance, if you look at the 'last-year' figure for the 16-24 agegroup, as opposed to the 16-59 sample, the percentage goes up from 11% to 29%.
Department of Health figures for 2001 indicate that 20% of schoolchildren aged 11-15 in England have taken an illegal drug in the last year. As might be expected, the number increases with age, with 39% of 15-year-olds saying they have ever taken a drug, compared to 6% of 11-year-olds. Last-month figures are lower: 3% for 11-year-olds and 24% for 15-year-olds.
Over all agegroups, more males seem to take drugs than females do. According to Drug Misuse Declared in 2000: Results from the British Crime Survey, the BCS figures imply that 'in very general terms, women are more experimental in their drug use and mature out of it sooner than men do'.
By definition, the British Crime Survey doesn't cover what is without question the nation's favourite drug – and the one that does the most damage. See the legal drug for more about alcohol.
It's also worth noting that although the BCS is probably the best available source of statistics about drug use, with a sample of more than 13,000 people in the year 2000, the figures it provides are probably underestimates. One reason for this is that the survey doesn't reach homeless people, or students in halls of residents, and it also probably misses quite a lot of people who have chaotic lives and are rarely at home. All of these groups may well have high rates of drug use. Also, the fact that the BCS is a government survey, albeit an anonymous one, and that its main subject is crime probably deters some people from being honest about their drug use. The figures are therefore most useful as an indicator of trends rather than as an accurate record of numbers in a given year.
'problem' users
Most users don't experience serious problems. However, a small but significant minority do. 'Problem drug users' are defined by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs as those who are 'either experiencing or causing social, psychological, physical or legal problems related to their self-administration of drugs'. Any form of injecting drug use is also considered problematic.
Using a range of different sources, a recent estimate (Frischer et al 2001 – see help and info) puts the number of problem users at 268,000 (less than 1% of the population), including 163,000-244,000 problem opiate users, 161,000-169,000 injecting users and 161,000 users 'at risk of overdose'.
specific drugs
Cannabis is our most popular drug (not counting alcohol, of course). Of all adults in the 2000 BCS sample, 27% said they had used it in their lifetime, 9% in the last year and 6% in the last month. In the 16-24 agegroup, the figures were 45%, 25% and 17% respectively.
After cannabis, amphetamines are the most widely used drug in England and Wales. Of all adults in the 2000 BCS sample, 11% said they had taken it in their lifetime, 2% in the last year and 1% in the last month. Amphetamines show a particularly big surge in use with the 16-24 agegroup: about three times as many people report using it compared with the whole sample – 34.5%, 6% and 3% for lifetime, last-year and last-month use respectively.
For ecstasy, 5%, 2%, and 1% of all adults reported lifetime, last-month and last-year use respectively in the BCS. In the 16-24 agegroup, the figures were 11%, 5% and 3%.
Cocaine was used by a reported 5% of adults (lifetime), 2% (last year) and 1% (last month) according to the BCS. The figures for the 16-24 agegroup were approximately twice as high, at 10%, 5% and 2%.
One per cent of the sample told the BCS they had taken heroin in their lifetime, and less than 0.5% in the last year and in the last month. In the 16-24 agegroup, the figures were 1.5%, 1% and less than 0.5% respectively.
Crack was used by 1% of the BCS adult sample in their lifetime and by less than 0.5% in the last year and last month respectively. The figures for the 16-24 agegroup were 2% (lifetime), 1% (in the last year) and less than 0.5% (in the last month)
For LSD, the lifetime, last-year and last-month BCS figures for all adults were 6%, 1% and less than 1% respectively. The 16-24 figures were 11%, 2% and 1%.
targets and trends
The BCS has asked similar questions about drugs since 1994, and increases in the overall use of drugs have been small or non-existent. For example, for 'last-year' figures, the BCS has shown a rise of less than 1% in the use of illegal drugs by all adults between 1994 and 2000.
No overall increase at all was recorded in the 16-24 agegroup. However, there have been significant changes in patterns of use for different drugs. And as the 16-24 agegroup is the focus of the government's drugs strategy and targets, trends in this group are of particular interest.
In 2000 the government said it was aiming for a 25% reduction in the consumption of Class A drugs – which include heroin, cocaine, crack, ecstasy and LSD – in this agegroup by 2005 and a 50% reduction by 2010. This has since been supplanted by a much less ambitious target of simply reducing the use of Class A drugs and the frequent use of any illicit drug among the under-25s. But even this may prove hard to achieve, judging by the key trends revealed by the BCS since 1994. These are that:
- Cocaine use has gone up significantly – from 1% to 5% for last-year use. Last-year rates for crack show a smaller increase – from 0.5% to 1%.
- There was also a significant rise in the use of ecstasy, particularly in last-month figures, which imply more regular use – these went up from 2% to 3%.
- Last-month use of LSD fell, from 2% to 1%.
- There were no significant changes in the last-year and last-month use of cannabis (26% and 17% respectively for 2000), but lifetime use rose from 36% in 1994 to 45% in 2000.
- There have been no significant changes in heroin use, or in the use of Class A drugs as a whole.
The published analysis of the BCS does not give figures for the use of ketamine and GHB, though there has been concern over reported recent increases in the use of both of these drugs.
Overall, the most significant trends are clearly the rise in the use of ecstasy, cocaine and crack. Cocaine seems to have supplanted amphetamines as the clubbers' favourite stimulant. The rise in the use of crack in the 16-24 agegroup is much smaller, but police and voluntary organisations are very worried about increased crack use among teenagers in the big cities.
help and info
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third party sites.
organisations
Drugscope
40 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3UD
Tel: Office 020 7940 7500
Tel: Information Line 0870 774 3682 (Mon-Fri 10am-1pm)
E-mail: infor@drugscope.org.uk
Website: www.drugscope.org.uk
National drugs information agency with services that include a library, a wide range of publications, policy research and consultancy.
HIT
Hanover House
Hanover Street
Liverpool L1 3DZ
Tel: 0870 990 9702
Website: www.hit.org.uk
HIT, formerly the Mersey Drug Training and Information Centre (MDTIC), was established in 1985 to reduce drug-related harm. Based in Liverpool, the organisation has gained an international reputation for developing, advocating and implementing a pragmatic and effective approach to the use of drugs. Website has an extensive collection of information on drug use which is available to download or buy.
websites
Drug Misuse in Scotland
www.drugmisuse.isdscotland.org
Presents the latest available information on drug misuse, drawing from a wide range of national data sources and surveys.
DrugsPrevention.net
www.drugsprevention.net
Information about the drug situation in Northern Ireland.
Drug Seizure and Offender Statistics
www.crimereduction.gov.uk/drugsalcohol53.htm
Outlines the patterns in UK drug-related arrests in 2000.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)
www.emcdda.org
Comparative information about drug use in the European Union.
DoH Substance Misuse Information
www.dh.gov.uk/ ..
Policy and statistics on substance misuse from the Department of Health.
The NEW ADAM programme
www.crimereduction.gov.uk/drugsalcohol33.htm
NEW ADAM (New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring) is a national research programme of interviews and voluntary urine tests to establish the prevalence of drug use among arrestees.
Prevalence of drug use
www.crimereduction.gov.uk/drugsalcohol75.htm#Prevalence
Key findings from the 2002/2003 British Crime Survey into the prevalence and trends of illicit drug use among 16-59 year olds.
Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use among Young People in England in 2003
www.dh.gov.uk
Smoking, drug and alcohol statistics for English schoolchildren from the Department of Health.
reading
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Guide to Drugs: A Guide to the Non-medical Use of Drugs in the UK edited Drugscope, 2004 |
Estimating the prevalence of problem and injecting drug use at the local level: an overview of a Home Office funded research programme commissioned by the Research, Development and Statistics Directorate. |
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(revised February 2003, resources updated February 2005)
