Public Health England
Details
The Public Health England team leading this policy transitioned into the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities on 1 October 2021.
The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities and the UK Health Security Agency have produced updated prevalence estimates of opiate and/or crack cocaine users in England for 2016 to 2017, 2018 to 2019 and 2019 to 2020 using a revised methodology.
You can see the data tables for each year and read more about the revised methodology at Opiate and crack cocaine use: prevalence estimates.
The data tables contain prevalence estimates of:
- opiate and/or crack cocaine users, organised into age groups
- opiate users, organised by age and gender
- crack cocaine users
The tables also contain estimates at local authority, regional and national levels for 15 to 64 year olds. They can be used by local authority commissioners to help to plan services to tackle opiate and crack cocaine dependence.
The report Estimates of the prevalence of opiate use and/or crack cocaine use, 2016 to 2017 (pdf, 1.02mb) published by the Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) includes the methods used to get to the estimates, along with comparisons to previous estimates.
LJMU has also published national and regional Estimates of the number of children who live with opiate users, England 2014 to 2015 (pdf, 749kb). The paper includes definitions and the methods used to get to the estimates.