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Enforcement expenditure

• UK enforcement expenditure
• EU enforcement expenditure

Working out how much money is spent on drug law enforcement is tricky. Governments will publish figures on how much money they spend on 'tackling illegal drugs' but this will often include expenditure on research, education and treatment as well as specific drug enforcement initiatives. To a large extent it depends where the lines are drawn and what is included in the given value.

Even when governments provide data for how much they spend on drug related law enforcement this can still be misleading. Such costs are likely to only be a budget for proactive enforcement, ie money set aside for specific agencies and departments whose brief is to tackle drug related crime. For example, 40% of the resources of the new SOCA (Serious and Organised Crime) agency (of an approximate total budget of £400 million annually) will be dedicated to stopping drug trafficking.

Reactive enforcement, such as money spent by local police forces, courts, prisons and probation services, is harder to quantify and less likely to be included in published enforcement expenditure figures. In addition to this, enforcement costs for acquisitive crime, street violence and anti-social behaviour, a significant proportion of which is illegal drug market related, are also unlikely to be included a published enforcement budget.

UK enforcement expenditure

In the financial year 2005/06 the UK government spent £1,483m (often rounded to £1.5bn in press releases) on "tackling drugs"^[1]. This breaks down as follows:

A much better idea of how much money is spent on drug enforcement can be found in a Home Office Online Report on the economic and social costs of Class A drug use in England and Wales, 2003/04.^[2] It estimated the annual criminal justice cost of Class A drugs to be £4,036m. This figure includes the cost of drug-motivated crimes (fraud, burglary, robbery and shoplifting) in addition to specific drug offences, and is an estimate for all criminal justice related costs (arrest, police detention, court appearances and prison stays).

A confidential 2003 report from the Number 10 Strategy Unit (subsequently leaked to the media and now available online^[3]) suggested that over half of all crimes (excluding supply and possession offences) were drug motivated, at a cost of £19bn year, although this figure included private security expenditure, property stolen, emotional impact on victim and lost output as well as expenditure on the criminal justice system.

EU enforcement expenditure

The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drugs Addiction has published a paper on public expenditure on drugs in the European Union covering the period 2000-2004.^[4] The €3,347 million figure given for UK law enforcement expenditure is the medium estimate from Home Office Research Study 249 – The economic and social costs of Class A drug use in England and Wales, 2000^[5].

The report, which has a very useful introduction highlighting the problems with the available data notes that;

In terms of quality, the research has found that: low quality data on drug expenditure are available for Ireland, Italy and Luxemburg, yet unsatisfactory quality data are available for Finland, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Portugal, almost satisfactory quality data are available for the Belgium, Netherlands and Sweden and good quality data exist for Austria, France, Spain and the UK. [p4]

and that

Contrary to the United States, and to a lesser extent Canada, European countries in general cannot provide estimates of their expenditure in drug policy. [p3]

References

1. ^ Home Office website – £1.5bn spent on "tackling drugs"
2. ^ Lorna Gordon et al (2006) – 3. The economic and social costs of Class A drug use in England and Wales, 2003/04 (Measuring different aspects of problem drug use: methodological developments), Home Office Online Report 16/06
3. ^ Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (2003) – Strategy Unit Drugs Report – Phase I
4. ^ EMCDDA 'Strategies and Impact' Programme (2004) – Public Expenditure on Drugs in the European Union 2000-2004
5. ^ Christine Godfrey et al (2002) – The economic and social costs of Class A drug use in England and Wales, 2000, Home Office Research Study 249