Research and analysis

Opiate and crack cocaine use: prevalence estimates by local area

Estimates of the number of opiate and crack cocaine users in local areas.

• From: Public Health England
• Published: 1 September 2017
• Last updated: 24 October 2023
  Show all updates

  1. 24 October 2023

     Added a link to the publication of updated prevalence estimates of people using opiates and/or crack cocaine in England using a revised methodology.

  2. 25 March 2019

     Updated with the opiate and crack cocaine use prevalence estimates for 2016 to 2017.

  3. 6 August 2018

     Corrected an error in the ‘Front sheet’ of ‘Estimates of opiate and crack cocaine use prevalence: 2014 to 2015’.

  4. 19 July 2018

     Updated spreadsheet to include prevalence estimates from 2012 to 2013 and 2013 to 2014. Liverpool John Moores University has also added this data to their report.

  5. 28 March 2018

     Added a link to the estimates of the number of children who live with opiate users and the number of opiate users who live with children, published by Liverpool John Moores University.

  6. 1 September 2017

     First published.

This publication was withdrawn on 28 October 2025

The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities and the UK Health Security Agency have produced updated prevalence estimates of opiate and/or crack cocaine users in England for 2016 to 2017, 2018 to 2019 and 2019 to 2020 using a revised methodology.

You can see the data tables for each year and read more about the revised methodology at Opiate and crack cocaine use: prevalence estimates 2016 to 2020.

Applies to England

Documents

[Withdrawn] Estimates of opiate and crack cocaine use prevalence: 2016 to 2017

MS Excel Spreadsheet, 693 KB

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Details

The data tables contain prevalence estimates of:

• opiate and/or crack cocaine users, organised into age groups
• opiate users, organised by age and gender
• crack cocaine users

The tables also contain estimates at local authority, regional and national levels for 15 to 64 year olds. They can be used by local authority commissioners to help to plan services to tackle opiate and crack cocaine dependence.

The report Estimates of the prevalence of opiate use and/or crack cocaine use, 2016 to 2017 (PDF, 1.02MB) published by the Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) includes the methods used to get to the estimates, along with comparisons to previous estimates.

LJMU has also published national and regional Estimates of the number of children who live with opiate users, England 2014 to 2015 (PDF, 749KB). The paper includes definitions and the methods used to get to the estimates.