Number of illicit drug injectors
Type the number of injecting drug users in this box.

In England, every Drug Action Team has an estimate of the number of injecting drug users for 2006/07, which you can access by clicking here.

There are detailed notes on these estimates, which may not have captured all heroin and crack cocaine users, nor injectors of amphetamine. These estimates should therefore be treated with caution when calculating coverage, and only be used in conjunction with other indicators of injecting prevalence in your area.

The figures cited by the 2008 'Shooting up' report. for the estimated number of injecting drug users in England and Wales ranged from 100,000 to 150,000. A Home Office report in 2006 estimated that there were 140,000 injectors of heroin and crack cocaine. Calculating the number of illicit drug injectors in a population is a difficult thing to do because illicit drug use is largely hidden. However, the figures point towards an average prevalence of injecting of around 0.2- 0.3% of the population.

It is also important to note that there is a distinction between 'injecting drug users' (mainly heroin and cocaine injectors, but also including amphetamine) and users of 'performance and image enhancing drugs' (PIEDs). PIEDs users are a largely distinct population, and following distribution, the syringes given to one group are not available to the other. This calculator only calculates coverage for illicit drug injectors, and there are further notes on PIEDs in the notes next to the cell requiring input of the number of syringes distributed to steroid injectors.