Drugs, sex add £10 bn a year to UK economy: official study

Illegal drugs and prostitution have contributed £10 billion to the UK economy – more than many other business activities like house-building, official data revealed on Thursday.

The data from the Office for National Statistics shows that calculated at current prices, the illegal drug and prostitution trades combined had an impact of £10 billion on gross domestic product in 2009.

Sales of illegal drugs and sexual services add around £10 billion ($16.7 billion) to Britain's economic activity each year, almost 1 per cent of the UK's GDP.

Of the £10billion figure, £5.3 billion was attributable to prostitution and £4.4 billion to the sale of illicit drugs.

Of this, £0.828 billion came from cannabis alone.

The inclusion of illegal drugs in official data will widen Britain's trade deficit, as the ONS assumes almost all drugs are imported.

But half of cannabis is assumed to be grown in Britain, which the ONS said would offer a small boost to Britain's farming and pharmaceuticals sectors.

However in India, virtually the home of cannabis, the new health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan is hardly likely to pay attention to that final statistic.

The figures come after the European Drug Report 2014 released earlier, which analysed the sewage systems of 42 cities for traces of drugs. It found that London had the highest cocaine use of any city tested, with consumption of the drug appearing to peak on a Tuesday.

The new ONS estimates cover the import, production and sale of illegal drugs and the provision of prostitution services.

Estimates difficult
The ONS said the £10 billion figure is based on various sources and assumptions, as finding accurate estimates of Britons' consumption of drugs and prostitution has proved tricky.

"The estimates are based on data of variable quality, with the estimates of illegal drugs activity markedly stronger than those of prostitution, but both definitely weaker than the estimates of legal activity," the ONS said.

Prostitution is legal in Britain, but brothels, pimps and advertising sex are not, making estimating the number of prostitutes especially complicated.

The ONS said it believed there were at least 58,000 prostitutes in Britain in 2004 - based on a charity's estimate of the number of prostitutes in London - and that numbers since then had increased in line with demand, which it based on the growing number of British men aged over 16.

For other figures, the ONS turned to Dutch research on the number of clients a typical prostitute has per week, as well as how much she or he spent on job-specific clothing and condoms - €125 a year and 50 cents per client respectively.

Prices came from a website where customers review British prostitutes, and they were inflation-adjusted using prices for lap-dancers and escorts already collected by the ONS.

By comparison, working out the volume of crack, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy and cannabis sold was easier, due to existing government estimates of the number of drug users.

Figures for an average drug user's consumption were harder to find, however. Two sources originally used for the price and purity of drugs - a United Nations survey and a government forensics laboratory - were no longer available, the ONS said.