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Home Office Research Findings 148

After two developmental phases, New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (NEW-ADAM) is now a national research programme of interviews and voluntary urine tests to establish the prevalence of drug use among arrestees (suspected offenders arrested by the police).

This rolling programme covers 16 locations in England and Wales and each data collection cycle lasts two years. Eight sites are visited in Year 1, followed by the remaining eight sites in Year 2. The first eight sites are revisited in Year 3, and so on.

In this NEW-ADAM report summary data are presented from the eight custody suites visited in the first year (1999–2000). This represents an interim baseline against which future progress in the Government’s anti-drugs strategy will be monitored.

Interviewed arrestees are also asked about their offending behaviour (focusing on acquisitive crime), enabling the relationship between drug use and certain types of criminal activity to be explored.

Key points from the data are

• urine tests of arrestees revealed that 65% tested positive for one or more illegal drugs, and 30% tested positive for two or more such substances.

• 29% of arrestees tested positive for opiates (including heroin) and/or cocaine (including crack). 

A short-term drugs strategy aim is to reduce the proportion of arrestees testing positive for these drugs by at least three percentage points (to 26% for these eight sites) by 2001–02.A longer-term aim of the anti-drug strategy is to reduce the levels of repeat offending among drug misusing offenders. 

• 15% of the interviewed arrestees were repeat offenders, regularly using heroin and/or cocaine/crack. 

The target is to reduce the size of this group by 25% in 2005 and by 50% in 2008.

• Average expenditure on drugs, by those who had used them in the last 12 months, was highest of all for those consuming both heroin and cocaine/crack, at £290 in the last seven days or £15,000 per year. This compared with £169 per week (around £9,000 per year) for all interviewed arrestees.

• Users of both heroin and cocaine/crack represented just under a quarter of the arrestees interviewed, yet were responsible for more than three-fifths of the illegal income reported. On average their illegal income was around £15,000 per year – a similar amount to their expenditure on drugs.

• 40% of arrestees who reported using illegal drugs in the last year acknowledged a link between their drug use and offending. Past year users of heroin and/or cocaine/crack were nearly twice as likely (78%) to acknowledge a link.

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