In July, two sets of government statistics, from the NHS and the Home Office British Crime Survey: Drug Misuse Declared (BCS), again revealed that, overall, drug use has been falling in Britain. Unsurprisingly, the findings were barely reported: if there is no scare factor to a drug story, the media has a habit of ignoring it. But what is interesting about
these statistics is that they pose an unexpected and tricky question: why has drug use fallen?