Addicts cost taxpayers £800,000

totalgenius

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A drug addict costs the taxpayer more than £800,000 over the addict's lifetime, a government review has said.

But it said this could be cut by more than £730,000 if they were successfully given treatment by the age of 21.

The report also said creating drug-free prisons was nearly impossible and raised the suggestion of supervised heroin injection for prisoners.

Auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers, the report's authors, looked at NHS costs and factors such as the cost of crime.

The report's authors also admitted that even the £800,000 cost of each addict was likely to be an underestimate because they used "the more conservative" figures.

Their calculations showed a female "problem drug user" costs the taxpayer £859,000 over her lifetime, with a male user costing slightly less, at £827,000.

There are thought to be about 350,000 problem drug users in Britain - which from the report's figures translates into the taxpayer paying out more than £300m on all of them during their lifetimes.

The authors also said: "The creation of drug-free prisons is an expensive option and was not considered to be practical in the current resource climate."

Clean urine

They added that addicts could be given supervised "retoxification" towards the end of their sentences so that they were less likely to overdose on their release.

The report pointed out the failings of mandatory drug tests, which have often been hailed by ministers as a success in reducing prison drug use.

It said: "Staff and prisoners generally felt that mandatory drug testing should not be used to monitor the behaviour of individuals since it was open to manipulation (with clean urine often being used as a currency), and other problems such as recreational users of cannabis moving to opiate use to avoid detection."





http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7454338.stm
 
leave them go cold turkey, or die, its their choice to be on drugs, why should we have to pay to bail them out, drug detox and rehab should be privatley funded by the addict or their family, not the taxpayer
 
oh, I am all for detox in prison, I just object to the retox comment. We shouldnt be paying for prison staff to inject prisoners.
 
leave them go cold turkey, or die, its their choice to be on drugs, why should we have to pay to bail them out, drug detox and rehab should be privatley funded by the addict or their family, not the taxpayer
Another option would be to make as much pure Heroin & crack available to them at all times, let them inject themselves then they would OD within a couple of days .. end of problem scumbag scagheads and crackheads all dead, end of
 
Another option would be to make as much pure Heroin & crack available to them at all times, let them inject themselves then they would OD within a couple of days .. end of problem scumbag scagheads and crackheads all dead, end of

thats is an option, but think of the tax that would be on it, with fags and beer they kill you slowly, so the government gets to slowly rape you while youre killing yourself with them, if someone was to take a massive hit like that, the government would slap a huge suicide tax on the stuff, meaning nobody would be able to afford it lol
 
The authors also said: "The creation of drug-free prisons is an expensive option and was not considered to be practical in the current resource climate."

Anybody who's worked within the system will tell you that "allowing" some drugs to enter a prison will keep the clients quiet and happy.
A drug free prison would be a riot!!

Curly
 
that just goes to show what a fkin joke the UK 'justice' system is. a lot of the people inside are there for stupid crimes commited so they could get money for the drugs they are hooked on, prison is meant to be hard, force cold turkey on them
 
Fu$%ing scum the lot of them,arm the police and let them shoot on site any junkie barsteward they see
job done:banana:
 
Fu$%ing scum the lot of them,arm the police and let them shoot on site any junkie barsteward they see
job done:banana:


Nice to see such a compassionate person on the forum!

Depressing.
 
Junkies need help. They have gotten into drugs for various reasons, failure of the family, failure of the education system, unemployment etc etc

We need to help these people. We don't need to spend nearly £1m during their lifetime to help them though. That means for every 300 junkies we could build a new hospital or maybe a few new schools.

I think the problem is that medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in keeping you a junkie. If you're not using illegal heroin, you're using legal methadone or some other legal drug to substitute the illegal drugs. Drugs are not the real problem, the system is.
 
They have gotten into drugs for various reasons, failure of the family, failure of the education system, unemployment etc etc

pahh

ive taken every pill i could get my hands on, speed, weed, lsd, shrooms, used to have a bong for breakfast, followed by half a bottle of vodka, cans of lager, more bongs, and any other drugs i could get my hands on and more beer, sometimes i was so wasted that i didnt know if i was god or a fish, didnt know if i wanted a shit or to skin a lobster and climb inside

but i made the choice not to take hard drugs, yes the systems a mess, but its the people that are the problem, and i have NO sympathy for junkies at all, and in prison i would FORCE them through hard cold turkey, then when they got out, theres much more of a chance of them staying clean and not going back inside
 
I think the problem is that junkies need to want to quit. If you force it on them, the chances of them OD'ing on release are pretty high.

I also agree that its not 'the system' that lets them down, its the fact they take drugs in the first place.
 
I always do my best not to make sweeping judgements about anyone or to lump people together into groups.

Every person is an individual and who knows what contributes to the mistakes and decisions they make in life?

I always think of the Phil Ochs song, "There But For Fortune".
 
legalise all drugs - but make anyone convicted of an offense committed to pay for drugs or as as a result of being high do the sentence with a twist - such as 3 months straped to the wheel of an earth mover.
 
I think the problem is that junkies need to want to quit. If you force it on them, the chances of them OD'ing on release are pretty high.

I also agree that its not 'the system' that lets them down, its the fact they take drugs in the first place.

Pretty much most people play with illegal drugs at some time in their lives. This can be said of most modern societies. If we have a bigger problem that almost every other country and it seems that we do, how can you say that the system is not at fault?
 
Pretty much most people play with illegal drugs at some time in their lives. This can be said of most modern societies. If we have a bigger problem that almost every other country and it seems that we do, how can you say that the system is not at fault?
The 'system' as you put it doesnt get people hooked in the first place.

Modern society has very little to do with it, if people want to take drugs, they will. Look at Nigeria, they have a rather large cocaine problem due to the traffiking from the americas. In this situation, the drugs trade provides the access to the drugs themselves.

If the UK has the worst drugs problems in europe, then this could be attributed to the ease at which they can be bought and the ease at which they can come into the country.

However, does the UK still suffer from this? All the news reports stating this fact are over a year old now.
 
its there choice, i dont do it, so they will not spead that money on me in another way, so why should they spend it on a druggy
 
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