Drug misuse in England and Wales: year ending March 2023
An overview of the extent and trends of illicit drug use. Data are from the Crime Survey for England and Wales.

Main points

• In the year ending March 2023, an estimated 9.5% of people aged 16 to 59 years (approximately 3.1 million people) reported using a drug in the last 12 months; 7.6% reported using cannabis (around 2.5 million people) and 3.3% reported using a Class A drug (around 1.1 million people).
• Although there were no statistically significant changes in prevalence compared with the year ending March 2020, levels were higher compared with ten years ago (year ending March 2013) for any drug (8.1%), cannabis (6.3%) and Class A drugs (2.5%), where prevalence were at all-time lows across these three categories.
• For most individual drug types, there were no changes in use compared with the year ending March 2020, except for hallucinogens (including magic mushrooms), ecstasy and nitrous oxide; while the prevalence of hallucinogen use increased from 0.7% to 1%, ecstasy use fell from 1.4% to 1.1% and nitrous oxide use fell from 2.4% to 1.3%.
  Overall, 2.3% (approximately 777,000) of people were frequent drug users (they had taken a drug more than once a month in the last year) similar to the year ending March 2020 (2.1%).
• The prevalence of drug use was higher in people aged 16 to 24 years, with 17.6% (around one million people) reporting any drug use, a decrease compared with the year ending March 2020 (21.0%); this was largely a result of falls in cannabis use (from 18.7% to 15.4%) in this age group.