Mapping Substance Use in BC and Canada: A report of the BC Pilot Alcohol and Other Drug Monitoring Project

Executive Summary

The objective of the BC Pilot Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) Monitoring Project (see http://www.carbc.ca/Home/Projects/tabid/232/ctl/ArticleView/mid/891/articleId/30/Default.aspx) is the building of a system to provide timely data on risky patterns of substance use and related harms as a means of supporting more effective policy-making, facilitating research on substance use and informing public debate. Significant progress has been made towards this objective through the development and piloting of a multi-component system to provide the required data, highlights of which include the following:

• Buy-in from key federal and provincial government bodies in the form of continued funding and representation on a project steering committee co-chaired by the BC Provincial Health Officer and Director of BC Mental Health and Addiction Services.

• Continued collaboration across multiple research agencies and individuals drawn variously from the tertiary education, government, health authority and non-government sectors.

• Hosting of an international research symposium regarding national and international experiences with AOD monitoring systems in which there were 90 attendees and 36 written papers presented from 11 countries. The proceedings of the symposium will also being prepared for special issues of a peer-reviewed journal.

• Design of consistent questions on patterns, levels and consequences of substance use across samples of the general population (n=11,000 for Canada per year, at least 1,000 per year for BC), school children (n=45,000 for BC in 2008), club drug and rave attendees (200 per year in BC), street entrenched injecting drug users (IDUs, 200 per year in BC), street involved youth (200 per year in BC) and emergency department attendees (500 to 1000 per year in BC).

• Effective links with national data collection exercises for BC data collection exercises for most components of the monitoring system (CADUMS, provincial school surveys, national treatment system data, national drug analysis services, mortality and morbidity estimates).

• Pilot testing of three new surveys of high risk populations (see http://www.carbc.ca/Home/Projects/tabid/232/ctl/ArticleView/mid/891/articleId/30/Default.aspx ) which will generate a total sample of 600 respondents from Vancouver and Victoria.
• Analysis of BC’s world class alcohol sales data to estimate per adult rates of alcohol consumption across 28 areas of BC (see Figure 9.4).

• Analysis of trends and geographic variation in size and purity of cocaine seizures made by police in British Columbia over the past two decade.

• Health Authority level data for British Columbia for rates of alcohol, tobacco and drug-caused mortality and morbidity, per capita alcohol consumption, cocaine seizures and addiction treatment services.

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