Direction-of-Causation Problem
Definition
The difficulty of establishing whether drug use causes offending, offending causes drug use, or both arise from shared upstream risk factors.
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 compulsive drug habit, most documented among dependent users of expensive drugs such as heroin and...
- Psychopharmacological Pathway
- Crime or violence produced by the direct effect of a drug on cognition, mood or self-control, independent of the cost of obtaining...
- Systemic Pathway
- Violence generated by the structure of an illegal drug market itself, including turf disputes, debt enforcement and robbery of dealers, in the...
- Tripartite Framework
- Paul Goldstein's 1985 model dividing drug-related violence and crime into three separate causal pathways: psychopharmacological, economic-compulsive and systemic.