The illegal drugs economy

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Compare estimates by year, geography, method and uncertainty.

Coverage: 11 sourced estimate and method records. Different measures, years and geographies; repeated estimates are not independent observations.

Retail expenditure, profit, gross value added and social costs are different measures. We do not add them together, average incompatible estimates or infer present-day market value by applying inflation alone. Publication date and reference year are separate. A later document repeating an earlier estimate is not an independent measurement. Coverage, assumptions and the relationship between estimates are recorded explicitly.

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Findings from release 1.1

Different figures answer different questions. The register now connects the report’s recent Home Office valuation, the ONS vintage comparison and the October wastewater trend update to their sources. It preserves the earlier June ONS observation as historical.

The Home Office combined valuation contains a six-drug England subtotal and a separate England-and-Wales cannabis model; it is not a full UK total. ONS household expenditure is a different estimation family. The October consumption-trend release supplies no replacement national monetary total.

Read the full evidence review · Inspect all 29 references and their roles · Reproduce the conditional UK scenarios

CLA’s contribution is the source comparison and transparent conditional arithmetic. The scenarios are not official estimates, forecasts or statistical confidence intervals.

Full findings, methods and record index · Previous releases and changes

Cite and reuse

Civil Liberties Action (2026). The illegal drugs economy [Dataset]. Version 1.1, 2026-10-16. https://cla-political-finance.copperchime4.chatgpt.site/databases/releases/2026-10-16-v1.1/economy-research.html

For an individual observation, cite its fixed-version record and the original source. Credit original publishers for their figures; CLA supplies the compilation, coding and stated analysis. Reuse terms.

Source examples

Methods, review limits and corrections. Release 2026-10-16; AI-assisted compilation, with no independent external review completed.