Weighing up Crime: The Overestimation of Drug-Related Crime

Abstract

This article explores the linkage of criminal harm to drug use and challenges prevalent overestimations of the proportion of crime that can be causally attributed to drug use. These estimates often use data from surveyed arrestees. This article uses data from the British Offending, Crime and Justice Survey to test the hypothesis that drug users are over-represented in arrestee samples, compared to other offenders. Self-reported, surveyed offenders who had 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. It is concluded that 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 stigmatization of drug users.