Keep up to date with Drugs & Crime
Tags are what WordPress calls keywords. I attach a small number of tags to every post to help people navigate between content with the same keywords. Tags may be people (Robert Buckland, say), organisations (The Howard League, Revolving Doors Agency), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, cocaine, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
It is clear that this group of drugs will be a priority for the EMCDDA to monitor over the coming years and that drug treatment agencies probably need to develop their understanding of legal highs and make sure they advertise that there is help available for those developing problems with their use.
The most recent EMCDDA estimate suggests that almost 1% Europeans use cannabis daily or almost daily (defined as 20 days or more per month). Since 2008, cannabis use is the main reason that Europeans enter drug treatment for the first time. Over this time, the number of first-time cannabis clients has risen markedly and cannabis users represent around half a more of all service users entering drug treatment in Cyprus, Denmark, France, Hungary and the Netherlands.
Last month (29 May 2015) the founder of Silk Road, the online black market, was given a life sentence.
But why was the site so popular? The short answer is that it made the purchase of illegal drugs triaghtforward and secure.
According to prosecutors, the site generated about $214 million in sales between early 2011 and late 2013. In late 2011 and 2012, while the site was still active, Carnegie Mellon’s Nicolas Christin gathered eight months of data that shows the 20 most popular categories purchased on Silk Road.
The Global Drug Survey becomes more valuable every year; this year over 100,000 people completed the survey. The survey is very different from research such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales because it is typically completed by regular, mainly recreational, drug users. The findings make fascinating reading and I recommend that you find time for a browse.
The ONS report makes it clear that the number of drug offences recorded by the police is heavily dependent on police activities and priorities. Changes in the number of offences are more likely to reflect changes in the policing of drug crime, rather than real changes in the number of drug offences.
If the next crime survey also shows an increase in use, we might start to wonder whether the reduction of young people in treatment is more to do with public expenditure cuts than a decrease in need.
This post is based on the most recent survey of teen drug use by the USA’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. It’s always interesting to look at drug trends in this States because so many substances that are popular there cross over to this country.
One of the principal attractions of a good infographic is that it’s possible to assemble many pages’ worth of key facts and figures in one image. The infographic below, developed by the Top Criminal Justice Schools website, manages to pull together information about the size of the global drug market in terms of: Users; Value; Expenditure and
Kingpins (several of whom reliably make the Forbes world’s richest list every year)
To ease us all into 2013, I thought it was time for another round up of bizarre social media and law enforcement stories; you can
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