Westminster Diary - 19th October 2006

Thursday, 19th October 2006

You may have heard on the news last week that residential drug rehabilitation centres across the UK are finding themselves in financial difficulty. This seems to be primarily because drug addicts are not being referred to them and they are having difficulty filling their beds. The reason for that is not, of course, that there are insufficient numbers of addicts who need these places. Quite the contrary. The real reason must be that addicts are being referred instead by various agencies to cheaper, non-residential rehabilitation courses.

If this is happening, I have rarely come across a more short-sighted false economy. As a barrister, I defended or prosecuted a great many drug addicts. I was rarely sympathetic – their habit began voluntarily – but I did gain an understanding of how difficult it is for these people to rid themselves of their addiction and with it their motive for offending. Breaking the destructive cycle of taking drugs and committing crimes is the responsibility of addicts themselves, not of society in general, but they will never do it alone. All need patient and intensive expert help and the best results are achieved in a residential setting. Those who undertake their rehabilitation part-time too often relapse.

I understand fully the reluctance many of us feel to offer drug addicts a tax-payer funded chance to correct their mistakes and I certainly take the view that addicts who do not take full advantage of a non-custodial second chance should not be offered a third, but we need to understand the consequences of not curing drug-addicted criminals of their habit. The odds are that the person who has broken into your house or your car did so to fund a drug habit. If, unusually, they are arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison but come out, as most do, with their drug habit intact, they will probably do it again. The costs of not rehabilitating a drug addict can be higher than the costs of doing so. That does not mean to say that drug addicts have an excuse for committing crime. They do not. It does mean that effective drug rehabilitation is in all our interests and if residential courses work best, that is what we should have.

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Updated on Thursday, 19th October 2006