Meagre success rates of drug treatment programmes are falling

The proportion of drug misusers who leave treatment programmes “drug free” is falling, despite record sums being spent on rehabilitation, new figures from the North West of England indicate.

Since 1999 the amount spent in England and Wales under the Home Office's drug interventions programme to treat offenders who misuse drugs has risen to £165m (€245m; $312m) a year, in a bid to boost public health and cut drug related street crime.

But figures compiled by researchers at Liverpool John Moores University and published in the online journal BMC Health Services Research on 11 August (www.biomedcentral.com/bmchealthservres, doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-6-205 …