Development of Statistical Methodology to Study the Incidence of Drug Use

Abstract

This work aims to contribute methodologically in the epidemiology of drug use, particularly estimation of incidence. No incidence figures of drug use in Spain had ever been published, prior to those appearing in these articles, and relatively little has been published for other countries.

Since around 2000, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), which is an agency of the European Union, has been making a concerted effort to promote the determination and publication of drug use incidence figures, given their great importance in designing prevention policies. The approaches used and results obtained by our research have been presented in three EMCDDA meetings (years 2007, 2008 and 2012), at a monographic meeting on incidence promoted by the Norwegian Institute for Alcohol and Drug Research (SIRUS) in 2009, and in the framework of a European project on new methodological tools for policy and programme evaluation (JUST/2010/DPIP/AG/1410) which ran from 2010 to 2012.

This work therefore contributes not only by presenting drug use incidence results for Spain, but also by describing the development of methods and sharing ideas that may be adapted for use in other countries.