Drugs misuse in rural areas has received increasing media attention but little work has been done to understand the nature and extent of the issue or to develop a coherent strategy for tackling it. This paper reports on a project in Driffield, a small town in East Yorkshire within the Humberside Police force area. Driffield serves a large agricultural area and is in many ways representative of rural England. The aims of the project were to examine drug misuse in a rural area and develop a police-led inter-agency
initiative to deal with it.

The key elements of the project were:
• A review of literature and general background to rural drug taking.
• An investigation of police intelligence on drugs in Driffield and surrounding towns.
• Community-based surveys of drug taking in Driffield.
• Sharing knowledge and assessing the potential for action.
• Developing a police led inter-agency initiative: the Participatory Drugs Profiling (PDP) Scheme.
• Assessing the value of the initiative in tackling rural drug misuse.