The next magic bullet.....
There were several interesting news stories this week:
On Thursday The Guardian run a story reporting that the total social and economic cost of class A drug use is around £15.4 billion a year. The research was commissioned by the Home Office and also reported that 90% of this cost was accounted for by drug related crime.
The Guardian followed this up on Friday with another story which reported that the UK has 327,426 "problem drug users" and that the country spent £5.9 billion a year on illegal drugs.
These figures again came from the Home Office.
What is going on here - there are supposedly 181,000 people in "structured drug treatment" in England and Wales (NTA figures).
This represents around 55% of the Home Offices "total number of problematic drug users" (if the numbers in treatment in Scotland and Northern Ireland were taken into account the figure would be even higher!)
Sorry - but I don't believe a word of it! All the research that I have ever seen suggests that the percentage ""in treatment" at any one time is not likely to be more than 25 to 33 % of the total. If the governments research is right then they aren't commisssioning very effective treatment are they ? I mean if a minimum of 55% of all problematic drug users in the UK are in treatment and its still costing £15.4 billion?
Last year we were being told that each £ spent on drug treatment produced savings of £9.50. On this basis we need to be spending say an extra £1.5 billion a year - on top of the roughly half billion already spent. That would represent a 400% increase!
Spend £2 billion a year and the total cost in theory comes down to zero. Yeah well, thats not going to happen anyway - and it wouldn't work if they did spend the money because there will always be "treatment resistant" individuals.
Interesting to compare the Governments expenditure on drug treatment to the cost nevertheless. Interesting to see that we spend 10 times as much on illegal drugs as we do on treatment!
My final news story of the week was widely reported - the suggestion that we ought to consider prescribing heroin instead of methadone. A senior policeman suggested that this would reduce drug related crime - and guess what, he is right! He is after all a policeman, and it his job to reduce crime.
I suspect that this would be even more successful than he thinks - for one thing the bottom would fall out of the drugs market as the dealers could not compete on price and quality against the NHS!
My job however has always been about treating individuals rather than finding solutions to social problems such as crime and from the treatment point of view I would predict the following:
It is to save money, to increase its popularity by reducing crime and to reduce the spread of blood borne viruses associated with drug use into the general community.
They really don't care if individual addicts sit in a corner and dribble while life passes them by if that is what it takes to achieve those goals (which are legitimate goals by the way - but not the only ones!)
To this end I suspect that prescribing heroin will be the next "magic bullet" which is going to achieve these goals!
We have now gone full circle and are rapidly coming back to the point where we were in 1966 - in 40 years there are now around 200 times as many heroin addicts as there were last time that prescribing heroin was official policy.
On Thursday The Guardian run a story reporting that the total social and economic cost of class A drug use is around £15.4 billion a year. The research was commissioned by the Home Office and also reported that 90% of this cost was accounted for by drug related crime.
The Guardian followed this up on Friday with another story which reported that the UK has 327,426 "problem drug users" and that the country spent £5.9 billion a year on illegal drugs.
These figures again came from the Home Office.
What is going on here - there are supposedly 181,000 people in "structured drug treatment" in England and Wales (NTA figures).
This represents around 55% of the Home Offices "total number of problematic drug users" (if the numbers in treatment in Scotland and Northern Ireland were taken into account the figure would be even higher!)
Sorry - but I don't believe a word of it! All the research that I have ever seen suggests that the percentage ""in treatment" at any one time is not likely to be more than 25 to 33 % of the total. If the governments research is right then they aren't commisssioning very effective treatment are they ? I mean if a minimum of 55% of all problematic drug users in the UK are in treatment and its still costing £15.4 billion?
Last year we were being told that each £ spent on drug treatment produced savings of £9.50. On this basis we need to be spending say an extra £1.5 billion a year - on top of the roughly half billion already spent. That would represent a 400% increase!
Spend £2 billion a year and the total cost in theory comes down to zero. Yeah well, thats not going to happen anyway - and it wouldn't work if they did spend the money because there will always be "treatment resistant" individuals.
Interesting to compare the Governments expenditure on drug treatment to the cost nevertheless. Interesting to see that we spend 10 times as much on illegal drugs as we do on treatment!
My final news story of the week was widely reported - the suggestion that we ought to consider prescribing heroin instead of methadone. A senior policeman suggested that this would reduce drug related crime - and guess what, he is right! He is after all a policeman, and it his job to reduce crime.
I suspect that this would be even more successful than he thinks - for one thing the bottom would fall out of the drugs market as the dealers could not compete on price and quality against the NHS!
My job however has always been about treating individuals rather than finding solutions to social problems such as crime and from the treatment point of view I would predict the following:
- The numbers seeking treatment would greatly increase - many users do not seek treatment because they don't want methadone, it doesn't do what they want it to do. Many users who receive methadone on prescription use on top - for the euphoria that heroin provides and methadone does not!
- Not many people would ever complete treatment "drug free" - although perhaps a few more would than now as the withdrawals are reconned to be less severe!
It is to save money, to increase its popularity by reducing crime and to reduce the spread of blood borne viruses associated with drug use into the general community.
They really don't care if individual addicts sit in a corner and dribble while life passes them by if that is what it takes to achieve those goals (which are legitimate goals by the way - but not the only ones!)
To this end I suspect that prescribing heroin will be the next "magic bullet" which is going to achieve these goals!
We have now gone full circle and are rapidly coming back to the point where we were in 1966 - in 40 years there are now around 200 times as many heroin addicts as there were last time that prescribing heroin was official policy.
Labels: dependency, drugs, policies, statistics, treatment
posted by anaddict @ 9:42 PM
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