The Wages of Sin? Illegal Drug Use and the Labour Market

Ziggy Macdonald,Stephen Pudney

doi:10.1111/1467-9914.00151

Abstract

We use data from the British Crime Survey (BCS) to analyse the relationship between illicit drug use and labour market outcomes for a sample of men and women aged 16–25. In using these data we highlight a serious design flaw in the BCS questionnaire structure that presents a serious barrier to statistical modelling of drug use at the individual level. We propose a simple way of overcoming this problem and proceed to estimate a model of occupational attainment jointly determined with unemployment and current drug use, conditional on past drug use. Separating the commonly abused drugs into a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ category, we find that past hard drug use has a significant positive association with current unemployment, but find no significant association between past hard or soft drug use and occupational attainment. We also find no significant association between current drug use and attainment, although we observe that current drug use is associated with current unemployment.

Highlights

The social consequences of illicit drug use and alcohol abuse present society and policy makers with a complex and difficult problem, the solutions to which are not well supported with readily available data
We present our estimates for the determinants of unemployment and occupational attainment. These are specified in the same way as the current drug use model, we interact marital status and gender in this specification to reflect the well-established differences in labour market outcomes between married and single men and women
We began by highlighting an observational problem that stems from the British Crime Survey (BCS) questionnaire design, which makes identification of drug use transitions problematic

Summary

SUMMARY

We use data from the British Crime Survey (BCS) to analyse the relationship between illicit drug use and labour market outcomes for a sample of men and women aged 16 to 25. In using this data we highlight a serious design flaw in the BCS questionnaire structure that presents a serious barrier to statistical modelling of drug use at the individual level. Separating the commonly abused drugs into a “hard” and “soft” category, we find that past hard drug use has a significant positive association with current unemployment, but find no significant association between past hard or soft drug use and occupational attainment.

INTRODUCTION

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

CONCLUDING REMARKS