Analysing drug abuse with British Crime Survey data: modelling and questionnaire design issues

We use the British Crime Survey (BCS) to analyse the demand for illicit drugs and the implications of drug use for the probability of subsequent unemployment. We demonstrate that the BCS questionnaire has a serious design flaw for this purpose, and we propose some simple modifications. We also develop a modelling technique that is suitable for existing BCS data and apply it to the 1994 and 1996 samples. We find evidence that soft drug use is associated with a greatly increased probability of later hard drug use and that past drug use is associated with increased probabilities of unemployment.