Can Wholesale Drug Prices really be measured at all?

Only recently, The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (The EMCDDA) published its latest report titles, ‘Pilot Study on Wholesale Drug Prices in Europe’.

In short, the report aims to create a unified means in which countries within Europe may be able to collate information relating to whole-drug prices (WDP) whilst allowing for the way in which countries vary in the underlying procedures.

For the EMCDDA then, the task in question is a serious and essential one.

Unfortunately though, due to the sheer number of difficulties associated with collecting data on WDP and the shameless number of inconsistencies throughout the report, it is difficult to take the task of the EMCDDA as seriously.

Firstly, and as the report itself acknowledge, due to the scarcity of the data on WDP, there is a danger of not guaranteeing representativeness and reliability of the WDP information that might be provide in the future.

Subsequently, this only serves to jeopardise further the credibility of some ways in which WDP is collected.

For instance, the detention of some arrestees will often provide an opportunity to discuss WDP but one of the dangers of acquiring such information at a time when an individual is under investigation for drug trafficking is that they may distort some of the facts so as to support an element of their defence.

Consequently, there is a strong probability of underestimating WDP prices’. Similarly, there is a danger of this occurring in correspondence with convicted prisoners and whilst intercepting conversations as it is common for traffickers to remove zeroes from the figures being discussed so as to evade further scrutiny from eavesdroppers.

Worryingly, these are the principle ways in which WDP is collected in Portugal and in the Czech Republic’s collecting procedures.

Additionally, in countries of which the analysis of purity is sometimes decentralised and operated both by public and private entities, it may happen that the results of the forensic tests are not present for those wanting to collect WDP and/or that the articulation between these two types of data collectors is not fully integrated.

All of this serves to suggest that any data collated would only be muddled by a vast number of inconsistencies thus rendering the entire effort worthless.

Interestingly though, this does little to trouble some of those that contributed to the report.

As a part of SOCA, Tony Saggers writes that whilst there is a standard reporting criteria to SOCA relating to WDP, there is no standardised approach to the initial recovery of price data any of the 38 police services in England, four police services in Scotland or the polices services for Northern Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

Saggers even goes on to say that SOCA does not request verification from police service contributions regarding the sources of data relating to WDP.

The Austrian procedure of collecting WDP is especially content to allow for any possible inconsistencies in the data collected. Indeed, its procedure involves doing little more than feeding the information into a computer program with little explanation of how the program functions beyond a poor set of clipart presentations and a trigger happy use of the ‘print screen’ key on most keyboards.

In its sustained effort to try and combat the prevalence of drugs, The EMCDDA believes that the best way to determine the success of disruptive supply policies is through an understanding of WDP.

In the report’s conclusion, having reviewed the varying procedures of those countries that did respond to the questionnaire sent out by the EMCDDA, it claims that, ‘it is feasible to collect wholesale drug prices in Europe, with a sufficient or even good degree of quality in a large number of countries’.

Really though, there is anything but a ‘sufficient or even good degree’ of information.

Due to the lack of data surrounding WDP at present, the number of unsolvable issues in the way that the information on WDP is obtained and the poor contributions from other countries, the task of the EMCDDA is a futile one that cannot be done properly at all.

As a result, the task of the EMCDDA may simply be deemed another waste of public money against a war on drugs that cannot be won.