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‘Drinking sensibly, never doing
drugs – is this the age of the young
puritan?’ asked the
Guardian
last
month. ‘Why drugs are no longer
cool: teenagers are internet addicts
while their parents snort cocaine,’
offered the
Telegraph
.
The Health and Social Care
Information Centre’s latest figures on
falling rates of drug and drink
consumption among secondary school
pupils (see news story, page 5) made
national headlines, just the latest of
countless reports over the last few
years that seem to confirm that
younger people are slowly turning
away from drugs – or older-established
drugs anyway. While services can
struggle to keep up with the growing
list of new psychoactive substances,
as well as higher rates of image and
performance-enhancing drug use,
problem heroin and crack use does
seem to be increasingly confined to an
older, entrenched population, many of
whom started using in the ‘heroin
epidemic’ of the 1980s when new
supply routes meant more drugs
coming into the country at a time of
mass unemployment.
It’s no secret that the dramatic
increases in funding for drug services
that came with the advent of the NTA
was in part driven by a desire to keep a
lid on crime figures, but few attempts
have been made to properly map out
the link between acquisitive crime rates
and problem drug use until the Home
Office’s new report,
The heroin epide-
mic of the 1980s and 1990s and its
effect on crime trends – then and now
.
According to the document, the
national peak of the epidemic was
‘probably’ between 1993 and 2000,
while crime peaked between 1993 and
1995. As well as a comprehensive
review of existing research literature,
the report used police force area-level
comparisons of the ‘Addicts Index’ and
recorded crime data from 1981 to 1996,
alongside modelling the number of
heroin/crack users and their offending.
The police area comparisons
showed that ‘different types of theft
generally peaked together within an
area’ but ‘the timing and size of these
peaks varied across areas and was
highly correlated with heroin use’,
concluding that about 40 per cent of
the national rise in the highest-volume
crime types – such as burglary and
theft from vehicles – from 1981 to the
peak could be ‘attributed to rises in
the number of heroin users’. The
modeling approach, meanwhile, found
that ‘heroin/crack use could account
for at least half of the rise in acquisitive
crime in England and Wales to 1995
and between a quarter and a third of
the fall to 2012, as the ‘epidemic
cohort aged, received treatment, quit
illicit drug use or died’.
However, the document makes it
clear that – despite the wide body of
evidence drawn together by
researchers – the ‘hidden’ nature of
the study group ‘means that robust
data remain sparse’. The paper is also
careful to stress that other factors –
most obviously unemployment – also
play a significant role, and while peaks
in acquisitive crime levels matched the
timescales of heroin epidemics in
England, the US and parts of Europe,
there were also regional exceptions.
The lack of high-quality data
means that the fundamental questions
of whether opiates/crack caused the
crimes committed by the people
taking them, and whether the peaks in
drug use correlated with peaks in
crime may never be answered
‘definitively’, it states. However, ‘on
causality, the evidence gathered here
shows that opiate/crack use almost
certainly generated additional
offences, but quantifying this precisely
remains challenging’.
The best summary, it concludes, is
to demonstrate the existence of an
‘epidemic narrative’ that fits the facts.
This is that drug epidemics produced a
cohort of users, and a steady rise in
crime during the 1980s – during which
most of England and Wales ‘remained
relatively unaffected by the epidemic’ –
then increased ‘very rapidly in the
1990s as every police force area except
Merseyside reached its peak of
opiate/crack use’. Then, once ‘all
susceptible individuals had been
“exposed”, the number of new users
probably decreased just as quickly as it
had risen’ and crime fell – at first
quickly as ‘less-recalcitrant’ users quit
in large numbers, and then more slowly.
‘The cohort was not homogeneous,’
it states. ‘Many (perhaps most) did not
become either long-term addicted or
prolific criminals and some were
offenders before using opiates or
crack. While many probably had the
clustering of crime risk factors that
could have marked them out for a
criminal career in the absence of the
epidemic, the cohort probably also
included a number of individuals whose
only crime risk factor was a suscep-
tibility to peer influence at a time when
heroin use was spreading in their area.
For the first group, heroin use may
have accelerated and extended an
existing criminal career and for some of
the second group heroin may have
kick-started a criminal career.’
Perhaps mindful of the potential
media reaction, the paper also clearly
spells out that the impact was on crime
volumes rather than overall harm,
which is largely driven by violent and
sexual offences. ‘The most important
caveat though, is that this narrative
does not imply that opiate/crack use
was the sole factor driving crime
trends,’ it states. ‘Many factors are
likely to have been important and
interactions may also be crucial.’
Among the policy implications, it
says, are that as the number of heroin
and crack users continues to fall, it will
continue to be at a relatively slow
pace, as many older users will have
been in and out of services for years,
and ‘focusing resources on the most
important individuals may be the key.’
The other main policy conclusion,
despite shifting drug trends, remains
the importance of preventing a future
epidemic, it stresses. ‘Evidence shows
epidemics do not strike all areas
simultaneously and there is a lag
between epidemic start and the
moment it becomes visible on treat-
ment or criminal justice datasets. Local-
level monitoring is therefore crucial.’
Report at www.gov.uk
Just how closely linked are drug misuse and acquisitive crime statistics?
News focus |
Analysis
GETTING A FIX ON FIGURES
6 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| August 2014
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘Heroin/crack use could account for at
least half of the rise in acquisitive crime in
England and Wales to 1995 and between a
quarter and a third of the fall to 2012.’
Home Office report:
The heroin epidemic of the 1980s
and 1990s and its effect on crime trends – then and now.