How popular are drugs?
Is everyone doing them, or is the perception greater than the reality? TheSite.org does the number-crunching to find out how common drug use really is.
Trying to find out how many people take illegal drugs is pretty difficult. You can't stand in a street and ask random people if they are dope-heads, and dealers aren't particularly known for their record-keeping.
The most accurate official data available is the British Crime Survey. Each year over 30,000 face-to-face interviews are conducted with a range of people across England and Wales to ask them all sorts of crime-related questions.
According to the most recent research, just over one in five of 16 to 24 year-olds said they used illegal drugs between April 2007 and April 2008. The use of Class A drugs among this age group was one in 15 over the same period.
Both these figures are the lowest on record since the survey began in 1995, with overall drug use down from the 1997 record of one in three. Use among 16 to 24 year-olds of Cannabis, the most common drug, has fallen from 26% in 1995 to 18% in 2007.
Other stats
Oldies vs youngsters: Drug use among 16 to 24 year-olds is two to three times higher than the rest of the adult population.
Girls vs boys: Boys are roughly twice as likely to take drugs than girls, according to Drugs Misuse, England, 2007, published by the Commission for Health.
Singles vs married: The same study found married people are statistically five times less likely to take drugs than those who live alone and have never been married. However, as this is measured across the whole age range, it could simply reflect the fact that older people are more likely to be married. Among unmarried couples, the figure is only slightly lower than singles. That is a more accurate demonstration that drug use is not affected by whether you are in a relationship or not.
Drug use among 16 to 24 year-olds is two to three times higher than the rest of the adult population.
Clubbers vs stay-at-homes: Among 16 to 29 year-olds, those people who said they'd been to a nightclub or disco in the last 12 months were twice as likely to have taken drugs as those who had not been clubbing.
How often?
Lots of people may have used drugs in the last twelve months, but many may have just been experimenting. Simply asking whether someone has taken drugs in the last twelve months doesn't show how common drug use is.
The British Crime Survey also asked people to whether they regularly used drugs. In 2007/8 among 16 to 24 year-olds, one in 13 said they used drugs at least once a month - down from one in eight during 2003/4.
The data does not show which drugs are most popular among regular users.
But is the data right?
It's pretty difficult to know. Recorded drug offences in 2007/8 increased by 18% from the previous year, although that could have a lot to do with police policy rather than an increase in use (the police issued 22,900 more warnings for possession of cannabis).
TheSite.org's own survey in 2005 found different results to the British Crime Survey, albeit with a lot smaller sample, and the data was not weighted to reflect the population at large. Some 71% respondents had tried recreational drugs at least once, with 96% of those saying they'd used cannabis.
The BBC commissioned research in 2006 that found that 20% of 18 to 24 year-olds answered "yes" to the question have you ever taken an illegal drug. Within that group, 45% had used cocaine.
