Increasing use of heroine and cocaine in Switzerland since 1990: use of a generalized Poisson distribution in the collected data

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Estimates of the prevalence of deviant behaviour, which are based on the usual survey methods are by far too low. Therefore, the use of capture-recapture methods or of the truncated Poisson distribution is to be preferred, provided appropriate data are available. Here an extended Poisson approach was applied in order to estimate the number of users of hard illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine) in Switzerland for each year from 1990 to 1993. These estimates indicate an increase by about 50% during the period 1990-1993.