Development of New Indicators for Assessing the Level and Consequences of Drug Use: Applications and Comparisons

The chapter regards new drug use indicators that have been proposed and applied since 2014 to measure individual levels of harm from drug use also considering poly-drug use. Such behaviour has been increasing since 2000. Indicators are based on the frequency of drug use within a specific time period and expert groups’ harm scores for the various substances used. The indicators allow the estimation of risk profiles for selected groups of individuals and comparisons over time and between populations. Recent advances in the classification of drug harms allow refinement of these indicators, separating harm consequences on self and effects on others. The new indicators have been applied to many datasets of problematic or adolescent populations (ESPAD survey for example) allowing comparisons among countries and populations in the framework of international projects. Using ESPAD-Italy survey information also related to personal behaviour, it was shown that high values of poly-drug use indicators are linked to specific behaviours related to interest in school, relationship with parents and use of leisure time. These results are consistent with previous analyses based on surveys among high school students in Italy. The most recent applications illustrate how the new approach can be used to assess the link between drug use and personal behaviour among adolescents with school drop-out in order to design proper prevention policies.

Keywords: Drug use consequences, Drug use indicators, ESPAD dataset, ESPAD-Italy dataset, Frequency of use, Harm scores, Harm to others, Harm to self, Health indicators of drug use, High school students, PDU data, Poly-drug use, Poly-drug use indicators, Prevention, Risk profiles, Weighted average.