Deliverable D1.1, Work Package 1.1

By Virginia Berridge, Johan Edman, Alex Mold and Suzanne Taylor

A review of the development of concepts and ideas about addiction in European countries since the nineteenth century and the role of international organisations in the process. For further reading, we recommend Concepts of addictive substances and behaviours across time and place.

Milestone 11 (Area 2, WP5) - SUBAQUA: Substance Use and Behavioral Addictions – Questionnaire from Alice Rap

By Gerhard Gmel and Simon Marmet

The final milestone of the ALICE-RAP – WP5: Counting Addiction aims at coming up with a comparative questionnaire for substance-related and non-substance-related addictions for Europe.There are large gaps in current estimates for substance dependence in Europe and estimates differ in various methodological aspects and the instruments used, making them barely comparable.

This report contributes to understanding of the role of different stakeholder groups in the formulation and implementation of policy in the addictions field, building on case studies carried out in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland and the UK.

Following D6.1, which documented the social costs attributable to the use of alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs in three EU countries with different policies with respect to illegal drugs (Poland, Portugal and Catalonia (Spain)), this report estimates which part of these costs are avoidable with decreased levels of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drug consumption, resulting in lower mortality rates and therefore benefits in productivity. It also analyzes the relationships between policies and costs in these countries, especially for costs occurring in the criminal sector, and estimates the avoidable costs associated with a potential introduction of a key policy, alcohol minimum unit price, in Poland.

Question:

Can a country's alcohol policies say something about what kind of tobacco policies are implemented? Or does a strict set of gambling policies guarantee that the country also has implemented strict policies for other addictive substances or behaviours?

The work undertaken in Work package 14, task 1, looks at policy scales for alcohol, tobacco, gambling and illicit drgus, in slightly different ways depending on the addiction and the history of previous scaling attempts. Two brand new policy scales were developed within the Alice Rap project - one for gambling policies and another one dealing with cannabis and heroin. Two previously constructed scales, one for alcohol and one for tobacco, are also included in the work package and their structures and methodology are systematically compared to each other.