NEWS

UPDATE

Drug treatment in England and the BBC

On Tuesday 30 October, the BBC broadcast a series of news items throughout the day claiming that despite an extra £130m in funding for drug treatment through the Pooled Treatment Budget between 2004/5 and 2006/7, only 70 more people successfully completed treatment drug free, suggesting that each additional successfully treated individual had cost the taxpayer £1.8m. This is factually wrong.

Below is a letter written to the national newspapers that repeated the BBC’s inaccurate and misleading story yesterday with an explanation of how the error occurred.

However, much more significantly, in focusing the public’s attention exclusively on ‘treatment drug free’ as the only benefit to be derived from investment in treatment, the BBC has dramatically under-represented the value treatment delivers to taxpayers and service users through saving lives, improving health and social functioning, and reducing crime.

Letter to national newspapers

Dear Sir

Sadly, the BBC got its numbers wrong. More than 5,800 individuals completed treatment free of illicit drugs in 2006/7, 2,200 more than 2004/5, not the 70 claimed by the BBC. This misunderstanding arose because the BBC misinterpreted 2004/5 data on the NTA website and failed to check their figures prior to broadcast.

This error, and the undue emphasis on drug free completions as the only benefit that the community derives from its investment in drug treatment, misleads the public into believing that what is actually a successful system is failing.

Drug treatment in England offers a good return on investment and the evidence is substantial, from international sources to the reports of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and the Audit Commission.

All individuals who misuse drugs are different but it can take seven or eight years before they finally overcome their addiction. The good news is that most of them will do so eventually and until then, as long as they receive treatment, are much less likely to take illegal drugs.

The £400 million the government invested in drug treatment last year has to be judged against 180,000 individuals whose treatment has protected them from early death, reduced their criminality and provided the opportunity to rebuild their lives in the future.

To judge treatment solely on the small numbers that finally leave the treatment system in a given year as the BBC has done is misleading and dangerous to the drug users, their families and society.

Yours sincerely

Paul Hayes

NTA Chief Executive

Hercules House

Hercules Road

London

SE1 7DU

How the BBC got the numbers wrong

The BBC requested figures on individuals completing treatment drug free in 2006/7, which were supplied. The BBC then subtracted some completely different figures relating to treatment episodes in 2004/5 from an online National Drug Treatment System report and came up with the figure of 70 more people completing drug free in 2006/7.

The difference between treatment

episodes and individuals treated

An individual may have more than one episode of treatment within the financial year, either by starting and stopping treatment more than once in the year, or during a single contact with the treatment system they may have attended more than one treatment agency, which would also count as another episode.

When data is reported at an episode level all of the occasions that an individual may have been in and out of treatment or at more than one treatment agency are counted.

When data is reported at an individual level an individual client is only counted once no matter how many episodes of treatment they may have had in the year. The number of episodes will always be higher than the number of individuals.

How the BBC should have compared the data

The BBC should have compared data on individuals only. The actual number of individuals in 2004/5 that at the year end were recorded as no longer in contact with the treatment system was 55,560 out of which 3,626 individuals were recorded as leaving drug free.

The number of individuals in 2006/7 that were recorded as no longer in contact with the treatment system was 66,123 out of which 5,829 were recorded as leaving drug free. An increase of 2,203 individuals on the numbers recorded drug free in 2004/5, not the 70 claimed by the BBC.