STAGE 1. Assessing needs
What steps should be completed?
Step 1: Explore the magnitude, characteristics and consequences of drug use
Drug use can increase mortality, either as an acute reaction after administration of a substance (overdose and other acute complications of drug use), as a result of disease processes caused by persistent drug use or the way they are taken, or as a result of accidents occurring while a person is under the influence of certain substances (traffic and work-related accidents linked to the use of alcohol or other drugs).
Many countries routinely analyse mortality trends by analysing the medical history of people who die. This provides information on the scale and characteristics of mortality caused by certain diseases in which drug use may have played a significant part. Therefore, it can be relatively easy to discover trends in mortality from liver cirrhosis (often a consequence of alcohol abuse) or lung cancer (much more common in smokers than non-smokers).
It should be noted that analysing mortality from some of these causes mainly provides information on the most long-term drug users (i.e., death occurs many years after a person begins to use or depend on alcohol or tobacco), but does not provide data on the newest users.
It will rarely be easy to obtain data on mortality from acute reaction to drugs, or accidents related to their use without implementing complex procedures that access the results of forensic and judicial investigations following a death by unnatural causes. Despite the difficulties in obtaining this type of data and its relatively low relevance for planning and evaluation of drugs policy, it is common to try to obtain information on mortality from an acute reaction to drug use because this information arouses considerable social, media and political interest.
The following guidelines may be useful when collecting information about deaths from drug use:
© COPOLAD. Cooperation Programme between Latin America, the Caribbean and the European Union on Drugs Policies.
