I’m having a devil of a time finding any useful information on this subject. I want to know how many crimes were committed under the influence of alcohol vs. drugs (specifically meth, but few sources break such data down by drug type).
Note that I’m not asking about rates of crime per type of intoxicant, i.e. how likely a given alcohol user is to commit crimes vs a drug user. That would be interesting, but what I’m looking for is something like “X violent and property crimes were committed by people under the influence of alcohol last year, and Y violent and property crimes were committed under the influence of drugs” or “X% of crime is alcohol-related, and Y% of crime is drug-related.”
Obviously I’m not interested in “consensual” crimes like, well, drug use, as all illegal drug users are committing these crimes by definition.
My expectation is that alcohol-related crimes will outnumber drug-related crimes, simply because there are many more alcohol users than drug users. But I’d like some basis for that belief. It doesn’t have to be unquestionable, just reasonable. But the best I can find is "15% of robberies, 63% of intimate partner violence incidents, 37% of sexual assaults, 45-46% of physical assaults and 40-45% of homicides in the United States involved use of alcohol.” from Wikipedia (which cites a questionable source), and "addicts using meth committed six million crimes in 2004” from FIGHT CRIME: INVEST IN KIDS, which also sounds pretty sketchy. But I’d take it, if both numbers could be compared to each other.
Interestingly, I have run across statistics about the relative criminality of drug vs. alcohol users, even though that’s not what I’m looking for, from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Alcohol and (illegal) drugs are generally treated separately in crime and other statistics.
And if you can find a source that includes alcohol in “drugs,” but splits out all drug-related crime separately, that will do.
– Calion Feb 26 '20 at 00:33