Curtin Uni researcher says illegal drug use likely twice as high as figures suggest

ILLEGAL drug use is likely to be about twice as high as figures suggest says a lead researcher from Curtin University.

Paper author Mark Harris, of Curtin’s School of Economics and Finance, said researchers were often faced with extremely low recorded participation rates when trying to model, or explain social ‘bads’ such as illicit drug use.

“Many people will have incentives to under-report their consumption including a fear of being caught, stigma and moral concerns, so it’s not sensible to look at raw numbers and assume they accurately represent what’s going on in the population,” Professor Harris said.

“In the case of illegal drug use in Australia, the reported participation rates of 12.2, 3.2 and 1.3 per cent for marijuana, amphetamines and cocaine respectively, mask true participation rates which are estimated to be almost double for marijuana (23 per cent), and more than double for amphetamines (8 per cent) and cocaine (5 per cent).”

He said the likelihood of a user misreporting usage was ‘a staggering 65 per cent for cocaine, 31 per cent for marijuana and 17 per cent for amphetamines’ and inaccurate estimates of the prevalence of certain behaviours could lead to significant implications if poorly-informed data was used to determine policy-making or funding allocation.

“The widespread use of data collected from individual and household level surveys by researchers and policy makers is clearly reliant on respondents supplying accurate and reliable information,” he said.

“For this research, we assessed survey participants’ individual reporting behaviour gleaned from answers to unrelated questions and used this information to calculate the likelihood that their zero answer genuinely represented non-participation, deliberate misrepresentation (lying) or infrequent participation.

“It is apparent the shortcomings of this type of data should therefore be well understood in order to make appropriate policy or health funding decisions.”

The research funded by the Australian Research Council and the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre was conducted in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the University of Exeter.

The paper, Modelling Illegal Drug Participation, published in the journal of The Royal Statistical Society, can be viewed at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12252/full.