European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), Praça Europa 1, Cais do Sodré, 1249-289 Lisbon, Portugal.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), Praça Europa 1, Cais do Sodré, 1249-289 Lisbon, Portugal.
Int J Drug Policy. 2018 Jun;56:187-196. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.01.021. Epub 2018 Feb 17.
The importance of illicit drug price data and making appropriate adjustments for purity has been repeatedly highlighted for understanding illicit drug markets. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has been collecting retail price data for a number of drug types alongside drug-specific purity information for over 15 years. While these data are useful for a number of monitoring and analytical purposes, they are not without their limitations and there are circumstances where additional adjustment needs to be considered. This paper reviews some conceptual issues and measurement challenges relevant to the interpretation of price data. It also highlights the issues with between-country comparisons of drug prices and introduces the concept of affordability of drugs, going beyond purity-adjustment to account for varying national economies.
Based on a 2015 European data set of price and purity data across the heroin and cocaine retail markets, the paper demonstrates a new model for drug market comparative analysis; calculation of drug affordability is achieved by applying to purity-adjusted prices 2015 Price Level Indices (PLI, Eurostat).
Available data allowed retail heroin and cocaine market comparison for 27 European countries. The lowest and highest unadjusted prices per gram were observed for heroin: in Estonia, Belgium, Greece and Bulgaria (lowest) and Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Latvia (highest); for cocaine: the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom (lowest) and Turkey, Finland, Estonia and Romania (highest). The affordability per gram of heroin and cocaine when taking into account adjustment for both purity and economy demonstrates different patterns.
It is argued that purity-adjusted price alone provides an incomplete comparison of retail price across countries. The proposed new method takes account of the differing economic conditions within European countries, thus providing a more sophisticated tool for cross-national comparisons of retail drug markets in Europe. Future work will need to examine other potential uses of the drug affordability tool.
The limitations of this measure reflect primarily the limitations of the constituent data; in addition to issues inherent in collecting accurate data on illicit markets, analysis that relies on data collected from multiple countries is susceptible to discrepancies in data collection practices from country to country.
非法药物价格数据的重要性以及对纯度进行适当调整，对于了解非法药物市场已经被反复强调。欧洲毒品和毒瘾监测中心（EMCDDA）已经收集了多种药物的零售价格数据，以及特定药物的纯度信息，这已经超过了 15 年。虽然这些数据对于许多监测和分析目的都很有用，但它们并非没有局限性，在某些情况下，需要考虑额外的调整。本文回顾了一些与价格数据解释相关的概念问题和测量挑战。它还强调了药物价格的国家间比较所存在的问题，并引入了药物负担能力的概念，超越了纯度调整，以考虑到不同的国家经济情况。
本文基于 2015 年欧洲海洛因和可卡因零售市场的价格和纯度数据，展示了一种新的毒品市场比较分析模型；通过应用 2015 年物价水平指数（PLI，欧盟统计局）对纯度调整后的价格进行计算，实现了药物负担能力的计算。
可用数据允许对 27 个欧洲国家的零售海洛因和可卡因市场进行比较。观察到未调整的每克海洛因的最低和最高价格分别在爱沙尼亚、比利时、希腊和保加利亚（最低）和芬兰、爱尔兰、瑞典和拉脱维亚（最高）；可卡因的最低价格在荷兰、比利时和英国，最高价格在土耳其、芬兰、爱沙尼亚和罗马尼亚。考虑到纯度和经济两个因素的调整，每克海洛因和可卡因的负担能力呈现出不同的模式。
本文认为，仅使用纯度调整后的价格进行比较，无法完整地比较各国的零售价格。所提出的新方法考虑了欧洲各国不同的经济条件，因此为欧洲零售毒品市场的跨国比较提供了一种更复杂的工具。未来的工作需要研究药物负担能力工具的其他潜在用途。
这种衡量方法的局限性主要反映了构成数据的局限性；除了收集非法市场准确数据所固有的问题外，依赖于从多个国家收集的数据进行分析，容易受到各国数据收集做法差异的影响。
