Calculating the Social Cost of Illicit Drugs

Download or read book Calculating the Social Cost of Illicit Drugs written by Pierre Kopp and published by Council of Europe. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social cost estimates are potentially a valuable source of informing policy makers on the impact of prevention, treatment and law enforcement strategies. However, estimating the social costs of illegal drug use poses a methodological challenge, given the difficulty of quantifying the link between drugs and their negative consequences and in assigning a monetary value to items that do not have market value. This study presents methodological guidance on developing indicators to calculate the social cost of drug abuse, mainly through a "cost-of-illness" approach. The document also contains two case studies of research projects in France that have applied a social-cost analysis to the use of alcohol and tobacco, and to illicit drugs.