DRUG TESTS INADEQUATE

Contrary to your editorial (22 April), the Scottish Prison Service has
neither given up trying to address prisoners' drug dependency nor has
need of random, mandatory drugs tests (RMDT) to "catch the drug users".

In 2003-4, RMDT "caught" about 2,200 drug-using prisoners, but more
than 18,000 self-identified, of whom more than 14,000 accepted an
addictions assessment. Politicians were forewarned - before RMDT was
foisted on SPS - that it would "catch" only one in two users of heroin
in Scottish prisons, based on prisoners' frank, anonymous,
self-reporting of their (low) frequency of inside injecting.

The then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, delayed publication of the
2001 MDT prisoner survey, released only in January, which enabled the
corresponding analysis for prisons in England and Wales. Why the delay?

Could it be because the analysis showed that RMDT's under-estimation
was even worse in England and Wales, where a 4 per cent
opiate-positive rate translates to 14 per cent of prisoners being
inside-users of heroin?

The SPS's plan to redirect its RMDT resources to more informative data
collection is enlightened. The likely methodology? Anonymous
self-completion behavioural inquiries, linked to biological sample, of
a type that were so powerfully arresting of wrong-headed policy that
politicians had to put a stop to them (Scotland after 1996) or delay
public dissemination of their results even when a parliamentary select
committee had insisted on investigation of RMDT (England).

Whereas in devolved Scotland, evidence clearly counts, enlightenment
is yet to dawn south of the Border.

SHEILA M BIRD Chair, Royal Statistical Society' Working Party on
Performance Monitoring in the Public Services Auchtubh, Lochearnhead
Perthshire