IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lec/leecon/03-3.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Use of Self-Report and Drugs Tests in the Measurement of Illicit Drug Consumpiton

Author

Listed:
  • Ziggy MacDonald
  • Stephen Pudney

Abstract

We use data from the New England and Wales Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (NEW-ADAM) programme to assess the validity of self-report measures of illicit drug use and to evaluate the use of alternative drug testing strategies within survey enquiries. Our analysis of the NEW-ADAM data reveals that bio-assay measurements of drug use tend not to be very sensitive to the cut-off levels selected for screening tests, a result that holds for cannabis, cocaine and opiates. We also show that a self-reported history of previous drug use can be used as a way of identifying individuals who are potential under-reporters of current drug use. This suggests a selective drug testing strategy which can reduce dramatically the cost of drug testing without comprising the accuracy of measurements of illicit drug use.

Suggested Citation

  • Ziggy MacDonald & Stephen Pudney, 2003. "The Use of Self-Report and Drugs Tests in the Measurement of Illicit Drug Consumpiton," Discussion Papers in Economics 03/3, Division of Economics, School of Business, University of Leicester.
    • Handle: RePEc:lec:leecon:03/3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.le.ac.uk/economics/research/RePEc/lec/leecon/econ03-3.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stephen Pudney, 2004. "Keeping off the grass? An econometric model of cannabis consumption in Britain," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(4), pages 435-453.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Drugs testing; Self-reports; Concordance; Testing Strategies;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lec:leecon:03/3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Abbie Sleath (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deleiuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.