C. Peter Rydell

Enforcement or Treatment? Modeling the Relative Efficacy of Alternatives for Controlling Cocaine

This paper presents a model that estimates the relative cost-effectiveness of four cocaine-control programs: three “supply control” programs (source-country control, interdiction, and domestic enforcement) and a “demand control” program (treating heavy users). Treatment emerges as by far the most cost-effective, and sensitivity analyses show that this result is very robust.

An Ounce of Prevention, a Pound of Uncertainty: The Cost-Effectiveness of School-Based Drug Prevention Programs.

America is spending billions of dollars on school-based drug prevention programmes. But how effective is prevention? How much does it cut drug use? This is an examination of the evidence from programmes, including Project ALERT and Life Skills in order to answer these questions.

Cocaine consumption in the United States: Estimating past trends and future scenarios

Abstract A Markov model of population flows in and out of light and heavy cocaine use is presented. The model quantifies how the recent epidemic shifted from light use to heavy use. Projecting future consumption from hypothetical initiation scenarios suggests: (1) reducing initiation is vital; even temporary lapses can have lasting negative effects; and (2) even if initiation ceased immediately, the quantity consumed would decay with a half-life of more than a decade due to inertia created by current heavy users. Hence, reducing initiation is necessary, but not sufficient; measures that directly address consumption by heavy users are also needed.