SAY NO, NO, NO TO THE REHAB INDUSTRY

The Methadone Lobby Has Built a Pharmaceutical Holding Pen That Keeps
Addicts Addicted

This year's award for Least Impressive Interviewee on National Radio
goes to Paul Hayes, head of the Government's drugs treatment agency.
Yesterday, on the Today programme, he inadvertently revealed one of
the reasons why drug addiction remains a blight.

Mr Hayes, CEO of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse,
was jobsworth personified: complacent, patronising and absolutely
unable to explain why only 3 per cent of the 200,000-plus addicts are
cured each year.

Like so many big cheeses in the drug rehabilitation industry - paid
for by us - he appears to be a committed apologist for the policy of
harm reduction and the use of methadone to stabilise heroin addicts.

Fact is, harm reduction drug strategies have become a self-serving,
self-perpetuating state industry. Instead of helping drug addicts to
become drug free, as 80 per cent of them would like (figures,
incidentally, from a survey by Mr Hayes's own organisation), official
policy has created a pharmaceutical holding pen in which the UK's
addicts can be coralled at a cost of UKP300million per annum.

This industry employs more than 150,000 people in "drug action teams";
makes fortunes for the manufacturers of methadone; gives lots of
research money to academics; and is a nice little earner for GPs and
pharmacists too. It's just a shame that we pay for it.

The only other people it may not be helping quite so much are its
customers. Once on heroin substitute, they may be trapped in limbo for
years without being offered a chance to become drug free. The industry
doesn't care: it sails on like an ocean liner, with a generation of
drug users on board.

Harm reduction has become a pharmaceutical monster. Half the
UKP500million that the Government spends on combating illegal drug use
in England is devoted to prescribing an alternative addictive
substance. And one which is now abused as a street drug.

It costs as much to maintain an addict on methadone for a year -
UKP2,800 or more - as it does to put him on the average abstinence
programme for one month. Two months is usually sufficient to get most
people off drugs. Abstinence programmes are proved to be seven times
more effective than methadone. Yet the average stay on methadone is
five to six years and some people have been on it for 25 years.

How did we get into this ludicrous situation? Within the world of
drugs policy there is an ideological fault line. On one side is harm
reduction, as endorsed by offical policy; on the other, abstinence,
the view of the non-PC minority.

Less than 2 per cent of addicts are being offered the possibility of
abstinence. The charity, Addiction Today, reported this week that 12
rehabilitation centres would be closing because of lack of referrals.

Professor Neil McKeganey, of the Centre for Drug Misuse at the
University of Glasgow, says that harm reduction has its origins in the
1980s, when the Government feared that HIV was going to infect the
general population and constituted a much greater threat than drug
abuse. Needle exchange became official policy and treatment services
were given a bright new agenda: they didn't have to worry about
getting people off drugs. The idea of abstinence receded into the distance.

As well as being supported by Margaret Thatcher, harm reduction
appealed to the liberal consensus. Drug workers tend to be
compassionate people: they liked the gentle approach.

But that was then. Thirty years later drug use has proliferated,
eclipsing all predictions of HIV infection. Now there are more than
225,000 people in the UK getting treatment - the tip of the iceberg.
Forty per cent of addicts are infected with hepatitis C; up to 400,000
children live with parents who are adicts; and 80 per cent of
methadone users are continuing to use other drugs. Harm reduction has
failed spectacularly.

Astonishingly, the National Treatment Agency does not have a target
number of addicts to get off drugs. Yet its survey of 12,000 users in
2007 found that 80 per cent of heroin users and 50 per cent of
methadone users wanted to stop all drug use.

Street drugs are a lifestyle choice. Being a taxpayer is not; and it
is harder to be tolerant of the rotten choices of others when one's
hard-earned money is spent subsidising them long-term. Clearly, a sea
change in strategy is needed, though the vested interests are
enormous. The Conservatives would like to steer policy towards
abstinence. But then, it is said, so too did Tony Blair and Gordon
Brown when they came to office, only to be beaten down by the powerful
methadone lobby. The Scottish Government is shifting away from
methadone, but there is resistance.

Mr Hayes, meanwhile, is on record claiming that his way is supported
by a powerful body of evidence. (Of course it is; we funded most of
it.) "We must convince the public that money spent on drug treatment
is money well spent," he said. Frankly, he's got his work cut out.