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Epidemiology of Contemporary Drug Abuse

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Policing and Prescribing

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Abstract

In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1989) epidemiology is defined as ‘That branch of medical science which treats of epidemics’. This definition is unsatisfactory on two counts. Firstly, it presents a very dated and circumscribed view of the range of subjects studied by epidemiologists. Secondly, it is misleading because it conveys the impression that the field is solely the concern of medical scientists. It is certainly true that scientific epidemiological studies arose in the nineteenth century in response to community-wide epidemics of acute infectious diseases (Barker, 1973) and that such research is still important (for example, Cliff et al. 1987; Scientific American, 1988). However, for the past 50 years or so the impact of the majority of infectious diseases has diminished considerably, while the scope of the subject has broadened to include all diseases. Epidemiology is now the basic science of public health, embracing all morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, medical scientists have been joined by a growing number of experts from other disciplines—history, the social sciences, demography and statistics. Their different perspectives have further broadened the scope of the subject. Thus a recent dictionary of epidemiology defines the discipline as: ‘The study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states and events in populations, and the application of this study to control of health problems’ (Last, 1982). Consequently it could be argued, with some justification, that all the chapters in the present book constitute aspects of the epidemiology of drug abuse!

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Authors
  1. John Giggs
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nottingham, UK

    David K. Whynes (Senior Lecturer in Economic) (Senior Lecturer in Economic)

  2. University of Loughborough, UK

    Philip T. Bean (Reader in Criminology) (Reader in Criminology)

Copyright information

© 1991 David K. Whynes and Philip T. Bean

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Giggs, J. (1991). Epidemiology of Contemporary Drug Abuse. In: Whynes, D.K., Bean, P.T. (eds) Policing and Prescribing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11451-1_9

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