Client: The New Zealand Police

Date: April 2008
Authors: Adrian Slack, Des O’Dea, Ian Sheerin, Ganesh Nana, Jiani Wu and David Norman

This research developed a metric of the social harm caused by illicit drug consumption in New Zealand. Harms related to drug use include a wide range of tangible costs such as crime, lost output, health service use and other diverted resources. It also includes psychological, or intangible, costs such as reduced quality or length of life.

The report provides three broad answers.  It:

· estimates the total harm from illicit drug consumption in the base year of 2005/06.

· uses these estimates to determine the harm per kilogram of particular illicit drug types.

· develops the New Zealand Drug Harm Index, which shows the potential drug harm avoided by seizing illicit drugs.

The study showed that drugs consumed in 2005/06 caused substantial harm and drug seizures in 2006 contributed to avoiding much more harm.

· Drug use in 2005/06 caused $1.31 billion of harm. This was made up of $1.09 billion of tangible resource costs (0.70 percent of GDP in 2005/06) and $217 million of intangible costs.

· Opioids and stimulants, such as P/methamphetamine and cocaine, were two of the most harmful illicit drug types causing $1.1 million and $403,000 harm per kilogram. Cannabis is estimated to cause harm of $11,800 per kilogram. LSD has the potential to cause over $1 billion of harm per kilogram, but it is used in very small amounts per occasion.

· Illicit drug seizures may have prevented approximately another third again of drug harm in 2006 ($458 million). Seizures over the seven year period examined between 2000 and 2006 potentially avoided $3.67 billion of harm.

BERL project reference: #4616