Some Economics of Safe Injecting Rooms

Provision of safe injecting rooms (SIRs), needle exchanges and other harm minimisation schemes reduce mortality and other health risks that illicit drug users experience. However, SIRs diminish incentives to refrain from the use of drugs by reducing the risk of a key harmful consequence of use, name...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Australian economic review 2001-03, Vol.34 (1), p.53-63
Main Author: Clarke, Harry
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cost-benefit analysis
Costs
Drug abuse
Drug policy
Drug use
Econometrics
Economic models
Economic theory
Economics
Harm minimisation
Harm reduction
Health
Mortality
Risk
Social costs
Statistics
Studies
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Summary:Provision of safe injecting rooms (SIRs), needle exchanges and other harm minimisation schemes reduce mortality and other health risks that illicit drug users experience. However, SIRs diminish incentives to refrain from the use of drugs by reducing the risk of a key harmful consequence of use, namely the user's death. Moreover, such harm minimisation efforts are socially costly. Economic approaches to drug management balance benefits from harm minimisation against policy costs and the costs associated with a failure of community drug abstinence. This article shows that the economic case for SIRs disappears with conservative assumptions about adverse incentive effects of reduced mortality risks even when only modest weight is placed on drug abstinence objectives.
ISSN:0004-9018
1467-8462
DOI:10.1111/1467-8462.00176