FOI Ref: FOI/2022/4640
You asked
The information I would like to know is:
Statistics showing the number of people, aged 15-20 who have used party drugs, from 2018-2022.
Statistics showing the number of people in the UK (any age) who have used opioids in 2022.
By party drugs I mean cocaine, ecstasy and MDMA.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Estimates from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) on the number of users for various illicit drugs in England and Wales can be found in Table 1.11 (16 to 24 year olds) and Table 1.05 (16 to 59 year olds) in Drug misuse in England and Wales - Appendix table for the year ending March 2018 up to the year ending March 2020. Unfortunately, we do not provide a breakdown on 15 to 20 year olds specifically.
Tables 3 and 4 in our publication Victimisation and its relationship to drug misuse, common mental disorder and well-being in England and Wales contain estimates on drug misuse for May 2020 to March 2021 interviews. These tables were produced using data from the Telephone-operated Crime Survey for England and Wales (TCSEW), which launched following the suspension of face-to-face interviews during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. We were not able to produce the full range of estimates previously published due to the reduced set of questions and reduction in sample size for the TCSEW. Also, findings on drug misuse in this publication are not directly comparable with previous findings because of differences between these two surveys (see Section 7: Measuring the data for more information).
The face-to-face CSEW was reintroduced in October 2021 and we will be releasing updated data on drug misuse for the year ending June 2022 on 15 December 2022 on our website - Drug misuse in England and Wales: year ending June 2022.
Our data cover England and Wales. UK drugs data are collated and shared with European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) by the UK Focal point on drugs, Public Health England (PHE). UK focal point at PHE can be contacted at ukfocalpoint@phe.gov.uk.
If you have any crime-related queries in the future, please email crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will endeavour to help.