8 - Users' Perceptions of the Drug-Crime Link

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The previous chapters have focused mainly on the statistical association between drug use and crime. We have not yet discussed whether drug use and crime are causally connected. It might be the case that the two are statistically associated (when you get one, you tend to get the other) but not causally connected (one does not cause the other).

There has been no shortage of theories of the possible causal connection between drug use and crime. These include economic explanations (e.g., crimes are committed to fund drug use), psychopharmacological explanations (e.g., crimes are committed as a result of judgment impairment from drugs), and sociological explanations (e.g., drugs are purchased from the proceeds of crime) mentioned earlier. However, little is known about whether these explanations are valid, whether some are linked to certain conditions or apply only to certain individuals, or whether some are more common than others. It is possible that the causal connection between drug use and crime is different for women compared with men, younger people compared with older people, heroin users compared with amphetamine users, or car thieves compared with street robbers. Common sense tells us that different circumstances will involve different causal processes. However, it is still unclear when one explanation might apply compared with another.

The New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (NEW-ADAM) surveys were not designed to investigate causality directly because this would have required determining the main elements of a causal process including establishing a statistical association, identifying the temporal order between the presumed cause and effect, and ruling out any rival hypotheses (other events that might have caused the changes).