Simon Stephens from Addictions UK speaks on the subject of addiction and shoplifting, on BBC Three Counties. Can shoplifting be an addiction, like drugs and alcohol? Can someone have a pathological dependency towards shoplifting?
For more information on addiction, go to http://www.addictionsuk.com
* We are grateful to Addiction Today for kind permission to reproduce this article. *
Watchdog Launches to Save Vital Rehabs
Rehabs Prepare to Name and Shame Local Health and Council Chiefs
The Concordat Watchdog is officially launching on 14 September in the House of Commons. The event is being hosted by Amber Rudd MP. Deirdre Boyd and the Rt Hon Lord Mancroft will speak at the event.
The government’s drive to get addicts off drugs to reduce related crime, benefit dependency and the burden on the NHS is at risk of being strangled at birth by poor commissioning, according to the Concordat expert group of over 40 UK drug-free rehab providers. It is launching the watchdog to police the decisions of local drug and alcohol commissioners to check they are using public funds in line with government policy and regulations and highlight failings.
The ‘Concordat’ of residential rehab providers decided to take the dramatic step of launching the watchdog as evidence mounts that commissioners around the country are going against government policy and underinvesting in abstinence-based recovery, the goal of government.
Joint Strengths with the NTA
Serious recognition of the need for best-practice commissioning is demonstrated in the agreement between the Concordat Watchdog and the National Treatment Agency on Substance Misuse to work complementarily on specific commissioning issues/areas. NTA programme manager Jez Stannard has written that he is keen to talk about “how we can work together to make best use of the intelligence that is gathered as part of the Concordat Watchdog.”
Implementation of the Strategy Depends on Commissioning
The coalition government set out a clear policy in its Drug Strategy last year to reform the drug treatment system to reduce bureaucracy and prioritise abstinence based recovery to help people overcome substance dependency, rather than continuing to support the maintenance of addiction via treatments such as prescribing methadone. However, implementation of the strategy depends on the commissioning decisions of NHS and Local Authority budget holders around the country, and there are signs that many of them are going against the agreed policy.
Prime Minister David Cameron said this summer that: ‘Drugs policy has been a failure over recent years… We have spent too much time on heroin replacement and methadone rather than on trying to get people clean and clear up all the things in their lives that perhaps cause them to take drugs in the first place’. The Concordat Watchdog’s ambition is to help support exactly that aim.
Concordat website:
www.theconcordat.net
Addiction Focus welcomes the launch of the Concordat Graduates website. The site, which like the Addiction Focus website, has all the facilities of wordpress, can be located at www.concordatgraduates.org
The Concordat Graduates are a group of people in recovery that have benefitted from various rehab projects both here in the UK and abroad. Graduates of the Addictions Treatment Programme offered by Addictions UK are joining this organisation and will be supporting their campaign to publicise the effectiveness of addictions treatment using an abstinence model.
Addictions UK offers Home-based Addictions Treatment – for further details visit www.addictionsuk.com or contact us or telephone us on 0845 4567 030.
Addictions UK offer a range of treatment services for both Drug Treatment and Alcohol Treatment Services.
Home Detox can also be offered as part of an integrated addictions treatment programme.
“The Independent” newspaper claims “Rehab Needs a Fix” and reports on the poor take-up of the Public Sector of Rehab Projects in the UK.
According to “The Independent” newspaper, “Mitch Winehouse’s plan to open a rehab centre in memory of his daughter has shone a spotlight on the scandalous state of treatment for young addicts in Britain.”
Please feel free to share this article and lobby your local politicians!
Addictions UK supports the call for more Public Sector funding to be made available to those people addicted to drink and alcohol and who require addiction treatment paid through the public purse. We provide a specialist service throughout the United Kingdom and we could easily contribute more to helping those in need of assistance to address the problems of their addiction.
For further information please contact us or telephone 0845 4567 030. Addictions UK is a leading provider of home base Addictions treatment services.
Addictions UK have decided to post all their charges for their treatment options on their website.
Treatment Charges – Check them out – Get the best deal for yourself.
We urge people who are seeking treatment from Local, Regional or National providers of residential or home-based addictions treatment to check their charges. Find out the weekly sums charges to clients. They vary very considerably – especially those organisations that add on extras…
If “follow up” care is being purchased – then find out how much you are paying a week / day. Addictions UK, for example, offers free support for all clients through our 24 / 7 helpline. Daily treatment support sessions cost £30.00 and can be purchased on an ad hoc fashion. We are concerned at some of the Home Detox Providers that do not offer any on going treatment at all. It is easy to stop drinking however it is much harder to stay stopped. Help with ongoing dependence is crucial if an abstinence programme has any chance of working.
If Rehab Brokers – or referral agents – are being used (and some are very good) make certain that they are charging you the same as the provider themselves and that you are paying no more that you would if you went to them direct. We know of some referral agents that charge considerably more because they offer “support after treatment” at much higher rates that you can purchase else where – hence the need to ask questions. If you haggle for a hotel price – haggle over your treatment costs.
Sometimes Home-based addictions treatment can be far more economical because
A former minister with responsibility for drugs policy has called for the decriminalisation of all drugs. This is a u-turn on the previous Labour Position. Mr. Ainsworth an ex Defence Minister, is known as a heavyweight bruiser in this Party. He said the approach of successive administrations had failed.
The Member of Parliament for Coventry North East, a former defence secretary, said the current policy left the drugs trade in the hands of criminal gangs.
Coalition Government Ministers have insisted they remain opposed to the decriminalization of all drugs and re-iterated their policies of Rehabilitation and reducing the availability of drugs.
Could this new shift in Labour’s policy debate signal a clear difference in policy between the Coalition Government and Labour. Does H.M Governments Opposition want to shift us back with a vengeance to more years of Harm Minimisation? After their extraordinary muddle over cannabis during their last spell in office I wonder how many more u-turns they want to make. We cannot see Bob Ainsworth right wing colleagues supporting him. Can you imagine Jack Straw or one of his right wing cohorts meeting a delegation from Mothers against Drugs?
Our plea to the Coalition Government is spend some money on abstinence programmes. Do not polarise the debate – a mixed basket of policies is probably good. De-criminalising drugs is not going to make our massive addiction problems any better.
Erin Fitzpatrick, Office Intern
Across a war-torn Afghanistan civilians find themselves frantically searching for subsistence and the fortitude to make it through the long days. Unfortunately, the lack of food and money has, throughout the years, contributed to the desperate lifestyle that many Afghanis currently live. The most prominent and troublesome solution to malnutrition and the remnants of a culture infested with violence is substance abuse. More specifically? The opium that grows in their own backyards.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), no other country on the planet produces as much heroin, opium, and hashish as Afghanistan, severely problematic for a country already ravaged by war.1 The huge scale of opium production provides an explanation as to why prior focus on this issue has revolved around the eradication and prohibition of these drugs, not specifically on the problems it has caused domestically.2 According to a recent United Nations study, at least 350,000 opium and heroin addicts exist in Afghanistan across forty provinces. Comparably, according to the National Treatment Agency’s facts and figures, the United Kingdom has 320,000 problem drug users- 206,889 of which are able to seek and do seek available treatment services within the country.3
Summarizing this, the majority of opiate drug users in the United Kingdom receive treatment, whereas little to no treatment is readily available for Afghanistan’s growing addiction problems. If at any point in time you doubt the United Kingdom’s treatment system, just remind yourself of its growing success by looking at the progress that Afghanistan has (or hasn’t) made.
Most addicts spend, on average, £2 to £3 a day in parts of the world where daily earnings are around £1.50. In order to fuel their addiction, they sell their animals and family land. Some resort to more shocking, desperate measures.
The Green Paper on sentencing and rehabilitation, released by the Ministry of Justice, sets out precise proposals to address drug and
alcohol use of offenders. The paper, entitled ‘Rehabilitating Offenders to Reduce Crime,’ was released on 7 December 2010.
The necessity to ensure that drug misusing offenders fully recover from their addiction and avoid relapse while imprisoned is immediately emphasized. Proposals have been drafted by the organisation to deal with this issue. In terms of supporting these offenders, some of the proposed include (but are not limited to) the reduction of the availability of drugs behind prison walls and an additional array of drug-free environments for offenders in custody. The Ministry of Justice has also noted that it will be developing more intensive community-based drug treatment options separately for female offenders. Proposals have been made to work with the Department of Health to introduce pilots for drug recovery wings in prisons and to test options for intensive community based treatment.
Drug treatment in prisons will essentially be ‘reshaped’ with more of an emphasis on recovery and becoming drug free. With the help of the Prison Drug Treatment Strategy Review Group, the aspiration is to
The first groups of GPs to commission health services under radical plans from the government’s health department have been unveiled today.
The 52 groups of GPs from 1,860 practices across England, known as pathfinders, will manage local budgets and commission services, including services from local social enterprises, for the NHS and local authorities.
Collectively, the practices provide healthcare to 12.8 million people – around a quarter of the country’s population.
The move was outlined earlier this year in the Department of Health’s (DH) Equity and Excellence White Paper, in which DH said it wanted to create the ‘largest social enterprise sector in the world’.
Local GPs, commissioning local social enterprise and civil society organisations, was one of the ways it hoped to achieve this, along with transferring health services from the NHS to social enterprises and mutuals.
The pathfinders will now test the new commissioning arrangements before any formal and statutory agreement is made in April 2013. DH also said more GP consortia have already come forward to join the pathfinders programme.
“Healthy Lives, Healthy People…”
Lindsay Yates, Office Intern
On 30 November 2010 the Department of Health released a white paper entitled, “Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Our strategy for public health in England.” The Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley, forewords the document by calling for a radical shift in the approach to health challenges, especially lifestyle-driven health problems.
Among statistics about Britain’s obesity, STI rates, and smoking habits, Lansley reports a “relatively large population of problem drug users” in Britain. To deal with these issues, the government is calling for strong local and national leadership. Though “localism will be at the heart of this system,” a central government will lead the fight against health threats. The new public health service, titled, “Public Health England,” will be a part of the Department of Health, taking on responsibilities from 2012. It will find its funding from the NHS budget, secured by a ringfenced system “to ensure that it is not squeezed by other pressures.” The projected spend on areas that will be under Public Health England could be over £4 billion.
Localism will find its way in the system through the desire to address the root causes of ill health. The system will be designed to be responsive, defined by the government as “owned by communities and shaped by their needs;” resourced, “with ring-fenced funding and incentives to improve;” rigorous, “professionally-led focused on evidence, efficient and effective;” and resilient, “strengthening protection against current and future threats to health.” A mechanism of the new program, The Public Health Responsibility Deal, will be a means for collaboration with business and voluntary sectors on five networks, including: health at work, behavioural change, food, physical activity, and alcohol.
