What does the market for drugs in Winnipeg look like?

As the inaugural post on this blog I thought I'd start out with a hit. Or a rip. Or a toke. Or whatever you want to call it.

Illegal drugs are fascinating to me because they are one of those things that are ubiquitous but no one gets into specifics about. Because they are subject to so much regulation and so much police interdiction nobody really wants to talk to strangers about what drugs they did and when. Moreover, unlike toasters or cars we can't observe any direct economic data about drugs because drug dealers don't submit tax forms to the Canada Revenue Agency. That data is so poor is unfortunate from a medical perspective because drug abuse is a concern for long-run health of individuals and comes with a host of mental, infectious, and other health problems. 

This presents a pretty important problem to people who want to observe these transactions and understand some of the decisions behind using illegal drugs. In Canada there is one major survey that looks at drug use - the Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey (CADUMS). Unfortunately the methodology of it is less than ideal. The sample they survey is not necessarily random because its performed by telephone, doesn't include people who only have cell phones, and has a pretty bad response rate at about 40-50% depending on province. When 50-60% of the people you try to talk to either hang up or don't pick up in the first place, you have to be worried about the data accuracy. 

More importantly the survey they conduct likely misses out on the people who are most affected by drug policies like interdiction - the least wealthy, the homeless, etc. (to their credit the CADUMS people acknowledge all of these issues). If they even have a land line in the first place, they are usually less likely to respond to a bunch of strangers phoning from a call centre to ask them about what drugs they use - they have more important stuff to do for that 25 minutes. 

Where can you get data on drugs where all of the people who are contacted have to give their details? Like the Doobie Brothers suggest, we have to take it to the streets. On the streets, when a police officer approaches you about drugs, participation is not voluntary. And when a police officer compels you to participate in their version of a drug survey they usually get to keep what your holding.

The Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) is no exception to this and they were kind enough to provide, through an access to information request, all drug related seizures in the city of Winnipeg from February 2009 to May 2014. This includes any drugs that were picked up incidentally but over 90% of the drugs seized were through busts. If we take this number of seizures to be correlated well with popularity of drug then we can ascertain the relative amount that Winnipeggers use types of drugs.

After bashing the CADUMS data for a couple paragraphs its important to emphasize that this seizure data has pretty significant limitations as well. The first thing to keep in mind is that this exercise equates drug use with drug seizures. While I do think that there is correlation between the drug seizure rate and the drug use rate in Winnipeg using this metric probably underestimates drugs use among certain populations and among certain drug users. The police are probably less likely to hassle someone in suburban Winnipeg than downtown Winnipeg, which means that this data isn't necessarily representative of drug users but representative of the drug users in contact with the police. Again, I think theres correlation but some skepticism is certainly in order.

These caveats notwithstanding lets light up some of these statistics. First, what drugs do Winnipeggers like to do? Its no surprise that the top drug thats consumed in Winnipeg is marijuana. Over the 5 year period approximately 9500 seizures of marijuana were made in Winnipeg. Cocaine and crack cocaine round out the top three. Prescription drugs, a major perennial headache in primary care clinics and emergency rooms comes in fourth in front of meth and MDMA.

The popularity of drug type by number of seizures - February 2009 to May 2014

Noticeable are the drugs not on this list. Heroin, by this data, is not a big drug of choice in Winnipeg. Same goes for opium. In total these two drugs were seized only 11 times over the five year period. This may be due to where these drugs are produced and how they are shipped. Heroin and opium are mostly produced in Asia - although Mexico is also a big player. Transport is usually by ship and heroin usually winds up in port cities - Vancouver being the obvious seaside city with a major population of heroin users.

While not as well-recognized as many other illegal drugs in circulation prescription drugs rank as fairly highly used in Winnipeg - moreover this metric likely under represents the true number of recreational prescription drug users in Winnipeg. Most doctors have been in the position in an ER or clinic where the patient seems like they're really milking their back pain for those T3s. I've been there. Its difficult to turn patients down and the vast majority of people who come into medical facilities for prescription drugs do so for legitimate medical purposes and not recreation. Nobody likes denying somebody medication for pain when they genuinely need it, so screening becomes a big headache.

Having a prescription for these drugs essentially gives a free pass if you ever get into it with law enforcement though, which is a major difference from other drugs - a prescription is not something generally given to use cocaine or MDMA. This gives some medical cover that may mean fewer busts of people who have prescriptions for painkillers but use them recreationally. Despite this, seizures do occur and painkillers comprise the top five prescription drugs busted in Winnipeg.

The popularity of prescription drug type in Winnipeg - February 2009 to May 2014

If we take a look at the time trends of use of the top four drug categories several things also leap out. First, marijuana has been the primary drug in Winnipeg throughout these last five years. It's strong and steady and it's got significant market share. In the crack cocaine market though there seems to be a switch that occurs late 2010 or early 2011 when crack cocaine was seized at a much lower rate than earlier. By the eyeball test, this coincides with a period when cocaine became seized at a higher rate. Maybe crack dealers became better at avoiding police. Maybe the demand side of the market began substituting towards cocaine and away from crack. Maybe there was a major single dealer of crack that got taken down the police and cocaine stepped in to replace the crack void. It's also possible my eyes are playing tricks on me and theres no actual relationship here. I'm not sure.

Timelines of number of seizures per day by top four drug categories

Where do Winnipeggers do drugs? Geography in Winnipeg plays a big part in determining drug use. Keep in mind for the following that the geographic points (each point indicating a seizure) are approximations and the true busts are within 2-3 blocks. 

For the most part the neighbourhoods that see the most drug busts are in the north end and downtown of Winnipeg. These are notoriously rough areas in Winnipeg for high crime and poverty and the distribution of drug use dissipates as you move into the suburbs. It's likely that there are three major factors influencing the picture of this distribution, especially with regard to the high level of drug busts in the north end. 1) People in the north end and downtown do more drugs than other places for a variety of reasons; 2) there is a higher population density in the downtown core and in the north end which by volume correlates to higher seizures; and 3) there is a higher police presence for crime-related reasons in the north end and downtown and that means more eyes to make more seizures. The inability to tease out these effects is one of the major aforementioned problems with this data. 

The geographic distribution of drugs busts through Winnipeg

Examining the geographic centre of the drug trade in Winnipeg (by average latitude and longitude of the busts) shows stability in the five year period of the data. 2014 is a bit of an outlier but probably because there is only four months worth of data. These geographic drug centres are again, in the north end of downtown Winnipeg right where the giant cluster of seizures is on the above map. 

The geographic centre of the drug trade (by average latitude and longitude) in Winnipeg by year

In Winnipeg, as mentioned above, poverty clusters around the downtown core and just north of downtown. Neighbourhoods become more affluent as the distance from the geographic centre of drug trade increases with some exceptions. Graphing how spread out the prevalence of drug use is from this geographic drug centre can tell us a little about how neighbourhood affluence relates to use. Below is a plot of the distributions of drug seizures based upon distance from the drug geographic centre of Winnipeg. The origin is this area around the north end and the tails of the graph are the probability of a drug bust close to the suburbs. For all four drugs, use is highly concentrated in the downtown and north end, but the spread differs for each drug in significant ways.

The distributions of drug use by distance away from the centre of drug trade in Winnipeg

The first noticeable thing is that crack cocaine is highly concentrated in the north end and downtown perhaps because it is a much more affordable drug. Marijuana is much more spread out reflecting the popularity of the drug throughout the city.  Cocaine has a similar spread that reflects its higher popularity among the suburbs. 

The distribution of prescription drugs is very interesting though. While there is a significant amount of use around the north end, there is a small bump in the prescription drug busts as you get very far from the geographic drug centre of Winnipeg. This may reflect the popularity of prescription drugs in the more affluent areas of Winnipeg and relatively higher levels of prescription drug use have been documented among wealthier populations. 

Finally, when do Winnipeggers like to do their drugs? If we assume seizures are more likely around the time of use, several trends emerge dependent on the type of drug. Theres a big trough in drug seizures in the early morning times for all drugs. Nobody apparently does drugs between 0300 and 0800. This may also have something to do with enforcement - I know that if I were a police officer, cracking skulls in the wee hours before breakfast would be the last of my priorities. If you were to take that as one of the reasons explaining these distributions, the time to do drugs without police interference would be between 0300 and 0800.

Moving onto specifics, marijuana use builds to a plateau just after lunch time and remains constant for the rest of the day. Prescription drugs are used in the early afternoon and then tail off as the night goes on. Cocaine use builds through the day until the 1800 to midnight period when people need it to keep the party going through the night. Crack cocaine users have a bimodal distribution and seem to use around lunch and then again around 2000. 

When do people like doing drugs?

There's a lot to get out of this data. Timing, geography and taste all play roles in Winnipeg's drug market. As someone in the medical field, the fact that prescription drugs are the fourth most used drug according to this metric also highlights medicine's role in addiction. Diversion is a major problem that the medical field hasn't really got a handle on and it's difficult because a lot of patients sometimes need medical opiates - screening for appropriate use is very difficult. That this data also likely underestimates prescription drug use makes me wonder if it isn't further up the rankings of drug use in Winnipeg. Some recent evidence has suggested that prescription drugs are a larger reason for ER visits and deaths than all other illegal drugs combined so this isn't a small problem.

Perhaps the biggest pro of this dataset is that the people who are included here are the people who are most affected by drug policy (almost tautologically). They are concentrated in the poorest parts of Winnipeg. While some of the interdiction observed in this data certainly targets the suppliers of drugs, most of these busts seem small time and seem more likely to be users. In looking at all of the marijuana busts for example, over 95% seems to be quantities seized under 40 grams and over 75% of these busts are less than 20 grams. The median amount for a bust is just over 6 grams.

It's often difficult for me to understand the logic of harassing individuals over their use of substances like marijuana or crack or cocaine. Alcohol and tobacco are vices our society accepts and regards as health problems if individuals abuse them - why not these drugs?  Moreover, if this data is any indication, a high number of users in Winnipeg seem to have enough socioeconomic problems without the further inconvenience of having their doors kicked down in a vice operation.