Use of drug treatment services in England is rising

Hidden need for drug treatment services: measuring levels of problematic drug use in the North West of England.

BACKGROUND In the North West of England, data on drug users are routinely collected from a variety of agencies including specialist treatment centres, police and probation services. However, the covert nature of drug use means that alone, these conventional monitoring systems cannot provide the epidemiology required to target and develop drug treatment and prevention initiatives. METHODS Util...

Poly Drug Use - A Challenge for Drug Treatment

Poly-drug use refers to the use of two or more substances at the one time or repeatedly. It is common among both recreational and regular drug users across the world. Poly-drug use is a great contributor to the global number of deaths related to drug overdose. In this case, the likelihood of drug overdose and its pertaining complications in an individual is higher especially when benzodiazepine...

Drug treatment services in jails.

Validating estimates of problematic drug use in England

BACKGROUND UK Government expenditure on combatting drug abuse is based on estimates of illicit drug users, yet the validity of these estimates is unknown. This study aims to assess the face validity of problematic drug use (PDU) and injecting drug use (IDU) estimates for all English Drug Action Teams (DATs) in 2001. The estimates were derived from a statistical model using the Multiple Indicato...

Drug, Sex and Age Differentials in the Use of Australian Publicly Funded Treatment Services

CONTEXT Little is known about the proportion of the Australian population using alcohol or other drugs who may seek treatment. There is a need to have some additional estimates of population morbidity which reflect harms associated with use. OBJECTIVE To determine Australian population rates of publicly funded community based specialised alcohol and other drug treatment and in-patient hospita...