The EMCDDA have been trying to work out how much European countries spend on drug related services. It’s not easy, as they point out:
drug services usually do not stand in isolation and form part of many publicly-funded programmes including education and crime reduction and other services that provide support to problem drug users.
Labelled drug expenditure
Furthermore, they’re also having to look at various levels of government spending:
while a large portion of public money may be voted for central government support for community development, this same money may then be disbursed for expenditure to a range of regional or local programmes or projects, which may be coded to a specific health-related or education-related activity.
Apparently the UK is the only country that labels its explicit drug education spend (it’s 1.3% which compares with 24% that is spent on public order and safety). But just using those figures would distort the picture:
in the United Kingdom, much of the expenditure data is aggregated at programme level and, without a detailed analysis of local expenditure documents, it is difficult to classify using broad headings.
Even so, it’s interesting to look at the differences between different countries and the screen grab from the report seems to show just how different things are.
