Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Home Office Research Study 224

The extent of illicit drug misuse in Britain continues to be an area of keen interest for Government policy, the media and the public into the 21st century, as it was throughout the1990s. In 2000, the primary means of measuring the broad extent of drug misuse among the general population, and of young adults in particular, was still the British Crime Survey (BCS). 

This is a large-scale and high quality survey, with a core sample representative of households in England and Wales. There was also a booster sample of respondents from visible ethnic minority groups.

The BCS included an almost identical drugs self-report component in each of  the four sweeps, carried out in 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2000. This component asks whether interviewees, aged 16 to 59, have taken any of the most commonly used drugs in their lifetime, the last year and last month. This report focuses on the broad group of young adults (aged 16 to 29) and on drug use within the previous year, as this combination is thought to provide a good balance providing sufficient numbers for analysis yet having relevance to comparatively recent trends.

The Government’s anti-drugs strategy hones in further on the 16 to 24 age group and particularly on their use of Class A drugs within the last year and last month. Ambitious targets have been set for reductions in the extent of drug use by a quarter by 2005 and a half by 2008, from the baselines set in the BCS drugs report for 1998.

"Drug misuse declared in 2000: Results form the British Crime Survey" uses data from both of these studies in measuring if the government's targets are "on track"

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