Preferences and attitudes to illicit drug policy held by individuals are likely to be an important influence in the development of illicit drug policy. Among the key factors impacting on an individual's preferences over substance use policy are their beliefs about the costs and benefits of drug...

In 2001, use of the STRIDE data base for the purposes of analyzing drug prices and the impact of public policies on drug markets came under serious attack by the National Research Council (Manski et al., 2001; Horowitz, 2001). While some of the criticisms raised by the committee were valid, many of...

Drugs and crime are known to be correlated, but the direction of causality and the magnitude of the relationship have not been well established. We take a new approach to estimating this relationship and examine a little used, multi-site dataset of 3,500 inner-city drug users entering treatment....

This paper contains the first estimates of the price sensitivity of the prevalence of youth marijuana use. Survey data on marijuana use by high school seniors from the Monitoring the Future Project are combined with data on marijuana prices and potency from the Drug Enforcement Administration...

In recent years, the debate over the costs and benefits of legalizing the use of currently illicit drugs has been revived. This paper attempts to inform this debate by providing some evidence on the effects of illicit drug prices and legal sanctions for drug possession and sale on youth drug...

I discuss economic approaches to the demand for harmfully addictive substances and estimate time-series demand functions for the period from 1975 through 2003. My estimates suggest that changes in price can explain a good deal of the observed changes in cigarette smoking, binge alcohol drinking,...

Objectives: This study estimates the value that clients place on drug rehabilitation services at the time of intake and how this value varies with the probability of success and availability of social services.Methods: We interviewed 241 heroin users who had been referred to, but had not yet...