Hard Facts

CRIME FIGURES FALL WHEN HEROIN ADDICTS GET HELP

Addiction therapy saves money. Preliminary results from Britain's National
Treatment Outcome Research Study, released this week, suggest that every £1
spent on treating heroin addicts brings a return of £3 in reduced levels of
crime.

Yet despite these results, the government's new White Paper on drugs policy
contains no firm pledge of fresh cash for treatment beyond promising that
the £5 million in assets seized each year from drug traffickers will be used
to tackle the drugs problem.

There are thought to be more than 100 000 "problem" drug users in Britain.
Each one spends around 200 per week on drugs, largely financed by petty
crime. A team at the Maudsley Hospital in south London, led by Michael
Gossop, identified 1075 such people.

Most were heroin addicts, although many also had problems with other drugs
and alcohol. Their treatment mainly involved substituting prescribed
methadone for illegal heroin, or residential programmes encouraging total
abstinence.

A year after the start of treatment, Gossop's team interviewed 769 of the
addicts. On average, their use of street heroin had plummeted. Nearly 70 per
cent of those on residential programmes had been taking the drug once a week
or more. After a year, this had dropped to 40 per cent. For those on
methadone programmes, the number using heroin weekly fell from almost 90 per
cent to less than 60 per cent.

The rate of burglaries and other thefts committed by the patients fell by
almost half. This is similar to results from US studies ("Methadone: crime
cure or therapy?", New ScientisE, 1 October 1994, p 36). But it wasn't a
foregone conclusion, says Gossop: "There really are big differences between
the drug users and the treatment services."

The White Paper stresses the value of treatment. But groups working with
addicts say more money is needed. "The drugs strategy, while good in intent,
needs backing with a cast-iron guarantee that the extra resources will be
there," says Roger Howard, who heads the Standing Conference on Drug Abuse.