Estimating the prevalence of problem drug use from drug‐related mortality data

Indirect estimation methods are required for estimating the size of populations where only a proportion of individuals are observed directly, such as problem drug users (PDUs). Capture-recapture and multiplier methods are widely used, but have been criticized as subject to bias. We propose a new approach to estimating prevalence of PDU from numbers of fatal drug-related poisonings (fDRPs) using linked databases, addressing the key limitations of...