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Inter-American Observatory on Drugs |
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PROJECTS |
Estimating
the Social and Economic |
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RESOURCES RESOURCES RESOURCES
Information by Countries and Topics
Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse
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Governments, policy-makers and research agencies have shown a growing interest in examining the economic and social impact of drugs, and the first round of CICAD’s Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism included an indicator on this subject. The Plan of Action of the III Summit of the
Americas recommended “developing within the
framework of CICAD, a long-term strategy that includes
a three-year program to establish a basic and
homogeneous mechanism to estimate the social, human
and economic costs of the drug problem in the
Americas, and to support countries through the
necessary technical assistance.” Much preparatory work has
been done on methods that might be used to estimate
the impact of drug abuse on the economy.
In November 1998, CICAD, with the support of
the Canadian and Chilean governments, held a seminar
in Santiago, Chile on how to identify realistically
obtainable data and determine the most appropriate
theoretical model for that country. Since that time,
the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA), with
support from CICAD, has brought together a group of
researchers from around the world to develop detailed
methodologies, and has published some important
monographs on the subject of the costs of drugs. In 2001, in response to the Summit mandate, the Executive Secretariat developed a plan to strengthen in the member states existing machinery or systems that provide basic statistics for cost estimation (SIDUC on prevalence of drug use, for example; emergency room admissions for morbidity figures; Ministry of Health data on life expectancy, etc.). The plan is tailored to the data collection capacity of member states. In May 2000, CICAD provided financial support to the
Canadian
Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA) to organize the Third International
Symposium on the Economic Costs of Substance Abuse, which brought
together in Banff, Canada researchers from throughout the world to
address issues pertaining to cost research on an international
level. |
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Last updated Nov/15/01 |
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