You asked
I am sending this request under the Freedom of Information Act to ask for the following information:
The number of ecstasy/MDMA related deaths by county in England from 1993 to 2016.
We said
Thank you for your query regarding drug death statistics.
You asked us to provide the number of ecstasy/MDMA related deaths yearly from 1997-2016 for England by county.
We have recently published Deaths related to drug poisoning in England and Wales: 2016 registrations. This is the most recent data we have available. This can be found here: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsrelatedtodrugpoisoninginenglandandwales/2016registrations
Table 6a, 6b and 6c in the reference excel tables provide a time series breakdown for ecstasy/MDMA related deaths from 1993-2016. We currently provide drug misuse deaths for Local Authority, but not broken down by specific drug types: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/drugmisusedeathsbylocalauthority
To obtain a break down of ecstasy/MDMA by English counties please contact the Mortality Analysis team. Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales, including the calculation of mortality rates for specific causes, are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate). Such enquiries should be made to: mortality@ons.gov.uk, or at the above address. We recommend that you contact the Mortality Analysis team directly in order to discuss your data requirements in more detail.
As this information is already available to you via this route, we consider that s.21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. s.21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.