How Much Do Manhattan-Arrestees Spend on Drugs

摘要

Information about individuals' drug expenses can indicate much about the size of drug markets, the financial burden of use, drug-related crime, and potential challenges for treatment. Most often, expenses have been estimated holistically by asking respondents to report how much they spent. In 2000, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program introduced an advanced questionnaire using a series of highly specific questions like, How much cash did you pay for crack that last time you bought it. Methods: This paper describes a procedure for estimating arrestees drug expenses with the new ADAM questionnaire, discusses pitfalls in interpretation, presents findings for 2,979 ADAM-Manhattan respondents interviewed 2000-02, examines covariates of drug expense, and compares the 2000-02 findings with those obtained from 2,256 respondents interviewed 1998-99 with the previous questionnaire. Results: Among 2000-02 arrestees, median drug expense in the past 30 days varied widely with frequency of use and drug-user type. Infrequent marijuana-only users spent as little as $5, daily marijuana-only users spent about $600. Arrestees that used both heroin and cocaine spent over $1000. Estimates with the 1998-99 data were about half as large. Discussion: ADAM's new drug market questions may greatly advance the quality of estimates of drug expenses. However, further research is needed to better establish the estimator's accuracy.