Website of the Department of Health
Please note that this website has a UK government access keys system.
Page menu
You are here:
Statistics on young people and drug misuse: England, 2002
-
Last modified date:7 March 2005
The links to the Statistical Bulletin 'Statistics on young people and drug misuse: England, 2002' have been withdrawn since errors have been detected in some of the data. These errors are in the process of being corrected.
The Bulletin presents information on reported drug misuse among young people aged under 25 years from two key published sources. Information for pupils aged 11 to 15 is available from a series of surveys of secondary school children in England; information for persons aged 16 to 24 is available from the Home Office British Crime Surveys in England and Wales.
The errors were in the data taken from the report of the 2002 survey of secondary school children "Smoking, drinking and drug use among young people in England in 2002"
, which was carried out on behalf of the Department of Health by the National Centre for Social Research and the National Foundation for Educational Research. The errors were caused by the way that some of the derived variables had been calculated. Existing quality assurance procedures did not identify the errors at the time of publication; these procedures have now been tightened up
The affected variables for drugs are: whether heard of, offered or taken "any"
drugs (or any subgroup of drugs such as Class A drugs, but not these measures for specific drugs).
The 2002 headline figures will be corrected with the publication of the headline figures for 2003:
Data on young people aged 16 and over is available from the Home Office British Crime Survey. The latest available data are from "Prevalence of drug use: key findings from the 2002/2003 British Crime Survey"
(Home Office - Research Findings 229) available from Home Office, Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, 020 7273 2084 and in Portable Document Format on the Home Office website:
The Department of Health and the National Centre for Social Research apologise for any inconvenience caused to users of this information.
Tara.Sahadeo@doh.gsi.gov.uk
Additional links
Ordering publications
Contact details for obtaining hard-copy DH publications.
Help viewing PDFs
Useful tips to ensure you get the most from PDFs and the free Reader program. Topics covered include accessibility, troubleshooting and searching files.
Access keys
