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International Guidelines for the Estimation of the Avoidable Costs of Substance Abuse

Acknowledgments

These guidelines are the result of collaborative work between members of the International Working Group, appointed to oversee the project, and participants at the June 2005 Ottawa workshop organised and funded by Health Canada. David Collins (Australia) and Helen Lapsley (Australia) wrote the original discussion document which was presented and reviewed at the Ottawa workshop. They then undertook extensive revision and expansion of the document informed by other workshop papers, discussions at the workshop and subsequent written comments from workshop participants. The second draft was circulated to the Working Group for further comment, following the receipt of which the final version was produced.

In such a collaboration, assigning credit to individual authors is not simple. However, some authors have made particularly significant and identifiable contributions:

• Jürgen Rehm (Canada and Switzerland), Benjamin Taylor (Canada), Jayadeep Patra (Canada) and Gerhard Gmel (Canada and Switzerland) for the exposition "From the classical to the distributional method in epidemiology";
  
  
• Brian Easton (New Zealand) and Eric Single (Canada) for the discussion of the reliability and usefulness of avoidable cost estimates;
  
  
• Serge Brochu (Canada) for discussion of the derivation of the attributable fractions for crime;
  
  
• Eric Single (Canada) for the examination of the implications of unrecorded alcohol production and consumption for the estimation of the social costs of alcohol;
  
  
• Augusto Pérez-Gómez (Colombia) for discussion of issues relating to the estimation of the avoidable costs of substance abuse in Central and Southern America.

While all workshop participants made valuable contributions, it should be acknowledged that particularly important perspectives came from (in alphabetical order) Serge Brochu (Canada), Brian Easton (New Zealand), Rick Harwood (United States), Claude Jeanrenaud (Switzerland), Pierre Kopp (France), Jacques Le Cavalier (Canada), Augusto Pérez-Gómez (Colombia), Jürgen Rehm (Canada and Switzerland) and Tim Stockwell (Canada).

The workshop, and indeed the whole project, would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions of Louise Déry and her team from Health Canada.