Meagre success rates of drug treatment programmes are falling

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Meagre success rates of drug treatment programmes are falling
London Michael Day

British Medical Journal
Table of contents for Saturday 02 September 2006
http://bmj.com/content/vol333/issue7566/

The proportion of drug misusers who leave treatment programmes “drug free” is falling, despite record sums being spent on rehabilitation, new figures from the North West of England indicate.

Since 1999 the amount spent in England and Wales under the Home Office’s drug interventions programme to treat offenders who misuse drugs has risen to £165m (€245m; $312m) a year, in a bid to boost public health and cut drug related street crime.

But figures compiled by researchers at Liverpool John Moores University and published in the online journal BMC Health Services Research on 11 August (www.biomedcentral.com/bmchealthservres, doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-6-205) raise questions about the system’s effectiveness. Their analysis of more than 26 000 drug misusers in Cheshire and Merseyside entering treatment programmes between 1998 and 2002 showed that the percentage who were “discharged drug free” almost halved, falling from 5.8% to just 3.5%.

Mark Bellis, the university’s . . . [Full text of this article]




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