Direction-of-Causation Problem
Definition
The methodological difficulty of establishing whether drug use causes offending, offending causes drug use, or a shared upstream factor produces both.
Related terms
- Drug Court
- A specialist court that diverts substance-dependent offenders from prosecution into supervised treatment, with the judge playing an active monitoring role. Participants who...
- Economic-Compulsive Pathway
- Crime committed to raise money for a dependent drug habit, such as theft or shoplifting, rather than crime caused by the drug's...
- Psychopharmacological Pathway
- Crime or violence produced by a drug's direct chemical effect on cognition, mood or impulse control while a person is intoxicated or...
- Systemic Pathway
- Violence generated by the structure of an illegal drug market itself, including turf disputes, debt enforcement and robbery of dealers, in the...
- Drugs-Crime Nexus
- The umbrella term for the several distinct ways drug use and crime connect, rather than a single causal claim that drugs cause...
- Tripartite Framework
- Paul Goldstein's 1985 model dividing drug-related violence and crime into three separate causal pathways: psychopharmacological, economic-compulsive and systemic.
Explained in these topics
- The Drugs-Crime NexusThe difficulty of establishing whether drug use causes offending, offending causes drug use, or both arise from shared upstream risk factors.
- Drugs-Crime Nexus (Unit I)