Public expenditure on drugs in the United Kingdom

Aims: As part of its 2007 reporting to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the UK Focal Point on Drugs carried out an exercise to estimate public expenditure on drugs in the United Kingdom in 2005/2006. A further exercise, being carried out in 2009, aims to provide estimates for 2006/07 and 2007/08 and improve the methodology for estimating expenditures.

Methods: Public expenditure is categorised into labelled and unlabelled spend with labelled spend captured in governmental accounts and programme budgets. Estimations of unlabelled spend are produced using both micro-costing and gross-costing techniques driven by availability of data and research on which to base assumptions of attributable costs.

Results: Results will be presented. The majority of identified expenditure is unlabelled, mainly due to criminal justice costs and the reactive nature of police work. However, other large areas of unlabelled spend were identified, particularly on child and family social work.

Conclusion: Despite difficulties, it is possible to identify/estimate public expenditure on drugs both labelled and unlabelled. However, estimating unlabelled expenditure relies upon the existence of research that quantifies the link between drug use and health/social impacts. The validity of expenditure estimates would be enhanced by further research in this area.