State Drug Control and Illicit Drug Participation

Henry Saffer () and Frank Chaloupka

No 7114, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effect of state criminal justice expenditures and state public health expenditures on deterring illicit drug use. The empirical model is based on a demand and supply model of drug markets. The effect of a given expenditure on criminal justice or public health programs is dependent on the magnitude of the resulting shifts in the two functions and the demand price elasticity. A reduced form of the demand and supply model is also estimated. The data employed come from the 1990 and 1991 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Data on state and local spending for drug related criminal justice and drug related public health programs were merged with the NHSDA. The main findings from the regression results are that drug control spending reduces drug use. However, the results suggest for marijuana users, the marginal cost of drug control exceeds the social benefits of drug control. This may not be the case for users of other illicit drugs. Spending for drug enforcement by police and drug treatment are found most effective in deterring drug use. However, spending for correctional facilities is never significant which suggests that a more efficient method of reducing drug use might be to reduce correctional facilities spending and increase spending on treatment.

JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-hea, nep-pbe and nep-pub
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as H Saffer & FJ Chaloupka & D Dave, 2001. "State Drug Control Spending And Illicit Drug Participation," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 19(2), pages 150-161, 04.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7114.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7114

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7114

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().