Clause 9 - Initial assessment following testing for presence of class A drugs
Drugs Bill
9:10 am
Mr John Mann (Bassetlaw, Labour)
The amendments are intended to probe the Government's approach to assessment. In my view, the greatest weakness in the British drugs strategy is the person who undertakes the assessment. In reality, it is done by a range of people. As a result, the word ''script'' has taken on a new meaning; the addicts in my area repeatedly talk about getting a script. By that, they mean that someone who is not a medical professional makes a judgment on their treatment; that person then goes to a professional; and the professional comes in for a short time and writes the script. Those professionals are doctors.
I put it to the Minister that, in my area and everywhere else in the country, those professionals are the doctors who, shall we say, do not succeed when applying for jobs in general practice. The problem with that, which I have witnessed on many occasions, is that probation officers or drugs workers with no medical background—they may well come to the job with no training; perhaps they are psychiatry students or former drug addicts—operate under the generic term ''drugs worker'', which has no specific qualifications attached to it, and then presume to make decisions on treatment.
Those decisions are often wrong. The average dosage of methadone given in Nottinghamshire until nine months ago—it was comparable to that given in most of the country—was about 25 mg. That dosage does not work for most people, so they continue taking heroin on top of the methadone. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they keep in contact with the criminal community and have a criminal lifestyle.
The way to break that cycle is straightforward. It is to have the person's own general practitioner overseeing the treatment. That happens in 90 per cent. of cases in my constituency, and the results are phenomenal in terms of non-recidivism, reduction in crime, people returning to work and people remaining in treatment. We have moved from having two people under GP treatment to more than 320. The drop-out rate over the past 18 months is so small that it is possible to calculate it exactly. It is either five or six, depending on one's definition of dropping out.