Estimating the levels of acute drug-related deaths in France, 2001–2002: A simple technique to measure bias in overdoses recording

Abstract

Objective: To estimate under-recording of drug-related deaths in France.

Materials: A capture-recapture indicator is proposed with a view to estimating the number of drug-related deaths. The indicator is applied when cross-checking general mortality registry and police data sources.

Results: The under-recording of drug-related deaths was reaching 40% for the 2 years considered on the basis of the estimator.

Conclusion: The hypothesis adopted is that the deaths were subject to erroneous coding, and the causes classified as unknown or ill-defined. Official data should be interpreted with caution. Nevertheless, this issue should not hide the effects of an early implemented harm reduction policy. Further analysis is required to confirm and extrapolate the findings.

Keywords:

• Drug-related deaths
• invisible population
• capture-recapture
• France