Details for LEADER Deliverable 1.3 Guidance Pack main document

Illegal drug use causes many negative consequences for the whole society – referred to as the social costs of illegal drug use. Policymakers consider it necessary to apply a variety of measures in order to prevent, or at least attenuate, the negative effects of illegal drug use. However, the resources that can be allocated for this purpose are limited and priorities for their use must be established.

Although there are several guidance documents for estimating the social costs of drug use, there are many misunderstandings and a lack of general consent on how to solve methodological and practical problems arising in such estimations. The existing guidance documents often provide a good theoretical background, but they tend to be too general, and even for an experienced researcher it is difficult to apply their instructions.

The purpose of this new guidance pack is to introduce, for basic social cost components, a standard and internally coherent methodology for estimating the various consequences of illegal drug use, as well as to propose a standard way of presenting these results. It is hoped that such guidance will enable more social cost studies to be conducted in European jurisdictions and enhance data comparison between time and space of these social cost estimates. Such information will support policy makers and practitioners in continuing to advocate for evidence-based drug policy and to better determine where policy needs strengthening of additional implementation.

The LEADER Guidance Pack consists of two complementary tools: this Guidance PDF document, which introduces the reader to the topic and then presents the suggested methodology for estimating each of the social costs of illegal drug use, explaining and commenting the approach and then including practical examples illustrating each step of the estimation with the help of EXCEL screenshots; and an EXCEL file (project deliverable 1.4) containing examples of social cost estimations using real data, including ‘empty’ EXCEL templates, where own data can be introduced as to replicate the examples, obtaining results thanks to the automatic formulae included in each of the spreadsheets.