posted on 2009-03-16, 16:06authored byZiggy MacDonald, Stephen Pudney
We use the British Crime Survey (BCS) to analyse the demand
for illicit drugs, and the implications of drug use for the probability
of subsequent unemployment. We demonstrate that the BCS questionnaire
has a serious design flaw for this purpose, and propose some
simple modifications. We also develop a modelling technique suitable
for existing BCS data, and apply it to the 1994/96 sample. We find
evidence that soft drug use is associated with a greatly increased probability
of later hard drug use, and that past drug use is associated with
increased probabilities of unemployment.