Abstract
SUMMARY We use the British Crime Survey (BCS) to analyse the demand for illicit drugs and the implications of drug use for the probability of subsequent unemployment. We demonstrate that the BCS questionnaire has a serious design flaw for this purpose, and we propose some simple modifications. We also develop a modelling technique that is suitable for existing BCS data and apply it to the 1994 and 1996 samples. We find evidence that soft drug use is associated with a greatly increased probability of later hard drug use and that past drug use is associated with increased probabilities of unemployment.
Highlights
Drug abuse is an important social issue
We began this paper by highlighting two important issues concerning the process of drug use and its consequences: does soft drug use present a “pathway” to hard drug use, and what impact does drug use have on unemployment?
We have shown that the current British Crime Survey (BCS) questionnaire design generates an identi...cation problem which makes it di¢cult to draw reliable inferences about the dynamics of drug use
Summary
Drug abuse is an important social issue. It is an issue on which there are strongly divergent opinions, in terms of policy prescriptions. Public policy on drug abuse raises very complex issues. We are still far from a full understanding of the dynamic process of the development over time of individuals’ drug use and dependency, and of the private and public consequences of this behaviour at each stage. Without such an understanding, it is di¢cult to develop a convincing policy stance. The only regular government source of survey data on drug abuse in the UK is the British Crime Survey (BCS), and we discuss in this paper the use of the BCS in this context
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