Meticulous records kept by the British government from their rule in India may help combat drug addiction today—especially because the economics of drug use in modern times aren’t exactly easy to study.

“You can’t simply go to Wal-Mart and look-110815 at the sticker price, and people don’t want to talk to you because drugs are illegal and they think they’ll get in trouble,” explained Siddharth Chandra, co-author and an economist and professor at Michigan State University, in a statement.

“Our study is the first time the subject of how consumer populations switch between drugs is being studied with reliable data.”

This is because the data comes from a time when drugs use was perceived differently—in India under the British Empire.

“One hundred years ago these products were legal. In British India the government was actually selling these things to the public, and they kept meticulous records,” said Chandra.

A different cultural climate

And so Chandra examined reams of ledgers known as Excise Administration Reports in order to pull data for the first study of this kind—and there were some surprising results.

As reported in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, two drugs were particularly popular in India at that time: opium and cannabis in the form of hashish, known as charas. Obviously, opium and cannabis are completely different drugs, but analysis showed that users frequently changed between the two depending on which was less expensive—which is known as switching in economic terms.

“The time, place, and context are different, but the phenomenon is there. You might think consumers would treat them differently,” Chandra says. “But just because the two drugs used are very different, doesn’t mean people won’t switch.”

However, switching only happened with these stronger drugs—the weakest form of cannabis, known as bhang, was not used in lieu of opium. And this idea of substituting strong for strong depending on availability and price very likely remains true today.

“There are many policy implications for these results,” Chandra says. “Targeting a particular drug with policies and enforcement might backfire.”

Take, for example, heroin—a modern opium product.

“Many people know someone who has been affected by heroin—it is a very dangerous drug,” Chandra says. “But prohibiting harmful drugs selectively can be ineffective. Consumers may switch.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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