According to a recent article published by BBC News, over 13,000 heroin and opioid deaths have been excluded from the official statistics in England and Wales, raising concerns about the impact on the government’s approach to reducing addiction-related harms. A study conducted by King’s College London for BBC News revealed that there were 39,232 opioid-related deaths in the UK between 2011 and 2022, which is over 50% higher than official figures reported. The discrepancy, blamed on gaps in government data access, has prompted ministers to work with coroners to improve reporting, with critics warning that flawed statistics may have cost lives.
Opioid deaths per million people in England and Wales have nearly doubled since 2012, and this new study suggests the crisis is even larger than previously thought. Using coroners’ reports, the researchers from King’s College London’s National Programme on Substance Use Mortality were able to produce a more accurate estimate of opioid-related fatalities. It was revealed that the drug health data recorded by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics, often undercounts opioids because coroners don’t always list specific substances on death certificates, even though they appear in post-mortem or toxicology reports that the ONS cannot access. According to the BBC News analysis, while overall drug death figures remain accurate, policy decisions are usually shaped by the more detailed but flawed statistics.
In his interview with BBC Radio, Sir Philip Rutnam, who held the post of the most senior civil servant at the Home Office between 2017 and 2020, said “quite possible” that fewer people would have died, if the government’s drug policies had been based on accurate statistics. “It really does matter, first of all the level of attention given to these issues, but then specifically it will affect decisions on how much funding to put into health-related programmes, treatment programmes, or into different bits of the criminal justice system,” he said.
The research study was published in the International Journal of Drug Policy and focused specifically on opioid deaths; however, health experts have raised concerns about similar undercounts existing for other drugs. Moreover, other research work by King’s College London has found that 2,482 cocaine-related deaths have also been missed off ONS statistics over the last 10 years.
