Drugs (Hansard, 9 September 2003)

§ Mrs Curtis-Thomas
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what proportion of property crime is attributable to the misuse of Class A drugs. [127672]

§ Caroline Flint
Recorded crime figures include statistics on drugs offences, such as possession, and on property crimes, such as burglary, but do not record whether the latter are related to an offender's drug habits.
However, the Home Office sponsored New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (NEW-ADAM) research programme, which involved interviewing and drug testing those arrested by the police, provides an insight into the proportion of crimes that are drug related.
Analysis of the data from the first eight sites in the survey, collected during 1999–2000, shows that 65 per cent. of arrestees tested positive for one or more illegal drug, with up to 29 per cent. testing positive for opiates (including heroin) and/or cocaine (including crack). Whilst users of both heroin and cocaine/crack represent just under one quarter of all arrestees interviewed in NEW-ADAM, they were responsible for more than three fifths of all the illegal income reported.

§ Mr. Swire
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many prosecutions there were of people accused of possessing Class A drugs in the most recent year for which figures are available. [128126]

§ Caroline Flint
There were 17,634 prosecutions for Class A drug possession offences, and 12,388 convictions, in 2000 in England and Wales.

§ Mr. Swire
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what estimates he has made of the size of the illegal drugs market in the UK in(a) 1997, (b) 2001 and (c) the present day. [128125]

§ Caroline Flint
The Home Office has only produced one estimate of the size of the illegal drugs market in the UK. This was for 1998. The estimated quantity of drugs consumed over the course of a year was estimated at 566 thousand kilogrammes (this did not include ecstasy tablets, which are measured in tablets not weight. The estimated number of ecstasy tablets for the same period was 27,000). In total the estimated value of illegal drugs for that year was £6.6 billion.