Drugs & Alcohol
Tackling Rural Drugs Problems A Participatory Approach
This document is published for archival/historical purposes. It will not be updated.
Crime Detection and Prevention Series Paper No.81 (1997): Tackling Rural Drugs Problems – a participatory approach by Norman Davison, Louise Sturgeon-Adams & Coral Burrows reports on a project in Driffield, East Yorkshire which aimed to examine drug misuse in a rural area and develop a police-led inter-agency initiative to deal with it.
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.
Key elements
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.
Getting a copy
The paper, available as a summary 
PDF (23 KB) or a full report PDF (306 KB) provides action points for practitioners and partnerships contemplating the PDP approach.
Last update: Wednesday, August 27, 2008