Methadone: 'There is little evidence of any real progress'

ALTHOUGH there is considerable political will to wean former drug addicts off the heroin substitute methadone, there is little evidence of any real progress being made.

It is two years since the SNP revealed a strategy to move the 20,000 people who had become dependent on methadone to treatments focusing on recovery rather than on programmes that continued the cycle of addiction.

At that time, it was revealed that 210 addicts in the Lothians who wanted help were waiting up to a year for treatment. The government set a 2011 target of getting them help within 15 weeks. But there have been just modest increases in budgets, which have proved inadequate to set up the facilities required.

A subsequent Audit Scotland report has highlighted the vast gap between intention and reality, with only 6 per cent of the budget to combat drug abuse being spent on preventative activities. In the meantime, the country's methadone bill continues to spiral. It now runs at 25 million a year – and at more than 3.6m in the Lothians alone.

It would be money well spent if it worked, but research shows the dismal failure of methadone: only 3 per cent of addicts entering the substitute programme emerge drug free.

This may in part be due to the policy of allowing those on the programme to manage their own addiction by allowing them to take the opiate home rather than consume it within pharmacies.

This is an approach which has had tragic consequences in the past. In 2005, toddler Derek Doran died after ingesting methadone at his East Lothian home. In the same year a three-year-old Edinburgh boy survived six weeks alone in his home living on scraps after his mother died of an overdose.

The deaths of Lothian teenagers Vikki McGovern and Danielle Scott, both given methadone by addicts, serves as a further timely reminder of the dangers of allowing it into open circulation.

No-one doubts the government's intentions with regard to seeking better solutions. But current policies seem designed more to control addicts in as cheap a manner as possible, rather than tackling their problems head on.

Drug misuse costs Scotland an estimated 2.6bn a year – yet in 2007, we spent only 77m tackling it. Alternative treatment is not cheap but it has proven to be effective. The government funded LEAP pilot rehabilitation project in Stockbridge claims a 60 per cent success rate – twenty times more effective than methadone.

If the government is serious about breaking the circle of addiction, this is the road it must go down. Research shows that for every pound spent on treatment the country's economy benefits to the tune of 9.50 so there is every incentive for them to fully commit to rehabilitation programmes.