Public spending on drugs in the European Union during the 1990s: retrospective research

ENGLISH :
In this research we aimed to collect at EU level existing figures on public expenditure in the field of drugs, what is usually called "the drugs budget". This is composed of two types of expenditure: public expenditure directly labelled as drug-related - "direct expenditure" - and the resources spent by public authorities and generic services (police, customs, public health institutions etc.) to deal with questions arising from drugs - "indirect expenditure". While the figures relating to "direct expenditure" (such as a drug unit or a drug squad) are easy to retrieve, calculating the level of "indirect expenditure" is based on a complex estimate of the proportion of activity each public authority carries out in the field of drugs. Moreover, public expenditure also includes expenditure at central, regional and local level. The budget devoted to dealing with the drug phenomenon by the EU countries is divided between two main facets - law enforcement and health care. Despite a certain number of differences, during the 1990s, the countries of the Union displayed a rather similar policy for the allocation of resources in the field of drugs.
However and again, our results may be affected not only by the lack of data but also by the fact that law-enforcement expenditure is more easily retrievable than that for drug-related health care which is more spread into decentralised budgets and therefore more difficult to find etc. Globally between 70% and 75% of the drugs budget goes for law enforcement and the rest for health care. Germany stands alone in devoting a larger part of its drugs budget to law enforcement than the Union average. Sweden distinguishes itself by attaching a more marked priority to health care. On the contrary, France and the Netherlands, cases where their different choices in the field of drug-law enforcement have been largely commented upon, allocated their public expenditure related to drugs in a similar way among the two principal domains of law enforcement and health care. Nor did a countrys wealth seem to influence the distribution of its efforts between law enforcement and health care. Greece and Finland were characterised by analogous percentages. [...]
The main surprise of the analysis lies in the comparison between the United States and the countries of the European Union. In the end, in the mid-1990s, the United States turns out to spend less per problem user (4,172.4 euro) than the average of the countries of the European Union (6,853.8 euro). Compared with the United States, the average country of the European Union spent 1.53 times more for law enforcement per problem user and twice as much for health-care costs per problem user. In total, the average EU country spent 1.64 times more per problem user than the United States. (From the author' s abstract)