Download or read book Calculating the Social Cost of Illicit Drugs written by Pierre Kopp and published by Council of Europe. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social cost estimates are potentially a valuable source of informing policy makers on the impact of prevention, treatment and law enforcement strategies. However, estimating the social costs of illegal drug use poses a methodological challenge, given the difficulty of quantifying the link between drugs and their negative consequences and in assigning a monetary value to items that do not have market value. This study presents methodological guidance on developing indicators to calculate the social cost of drug abuse, mainly through a "cost-of-illness" approach. The document also contains two case studies of research projects in France that have applied a social-cost analysis to the use of alcohol and tobacco, and to illicit drugs.