Weighing up crime: the over estimation of drug-related crime

Background: It is generally accepted that harms from crime cause a very large part of the total social harm that can be attributed to drug use. For example, crime harms accounted for 70% of the weighting of the British Drug Harm Index in 2004. This paper explores the linkage of criminal harm to drug use and challenges the current overestimation of the proportion of crime that can be causally attributed to drug use. It particularly examines the use of data from arrested drug users to estimate the quantity of drug-related crime.

Method: Multivariate, secondary analysis of data from the British Offending, Crime and Justice Survey is used to test the hypothesis that drug users are over-represented in arrest data, compared to other offenders.

Results: It is found in logistic regression that the strongest predictor of arrest was not the frequency or type of offending, but whether an offender was in work or education. Offenders who have used illicit drugs were over two times as likely to be arrested as those who did not, even taking employment status and the type and frequency of offending into account.

Conclusion: Current methods for estimating drug-related crime endanger the validity of measurements of drug-related harm, with damaging consequences for the analysis of drug policy and the stigmatisation of drug users.