The Global Commission on Drug Policy’s provocative claims of non existent rises do not further rational drug policy debate, states Kathy Gyngell, CPS (Centre for Policy Studies) Research Fellow.
Gyngell´s searches back through UNODC World Drug Report statistical tables for 2008 – and all other years – singularly fail to elicit the evidence for the Global Commission’s claimed rises of 34.5% for opiates, 27% for cocaine and 8.5% for cannabis.
Gyngell writes, We now have the UNODC’s own detailed analysis of the figures that the Global Commission misleadingly attributed to the United Nations. Their investigation into how the Global Commission generated the figures shows that global drug consumption, in terms of drugs consumption prevalence, far from rising between 1998 and 2008, remained stable. Their best estimates of the number of cocaine and opiate users show prevalence rates for annual opiate use remaining stable at around 0.35% and for annual cocaine at 0.36 %, in the population age range 15-64, between 1998 and 2008. The Global Commission’s statistics are not just over-blown, they are contrived and misleadingly attributed.
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