THE
U.K’s MOST WORKABLE SYSTEM
FOR
THE COMMISSIONING OF
RECOVERY
FROM DRUG ADDICTION.
(SOLELY
TO MAINTAIN DRUG PROFITS.)
The
Government’s Payment by Results (PBR) schemes are now estimated by
the National Audit Office to account for over £15 BILLION of public
spending.
These
are outcome based payment schemes where payment of all or part of the
agreed charges DEPENDS ON THE PROVIDER ACTUALLY ACHIEVING RESULTS
specified by the national or local government Department contracting
for the Provider’s services.
When,
in the last quarter of 2010, the then Government recognised that
since 1948 the National Health Service had for more than 60 years
been paying for rehabilitation of addicted drug addicts - whilst
receiving an actual delivery by a majority of
Providers of only 3% of cured (i.e. long term
abstinent) users, the Rt Hon Oliver Letwin
and his team introduced probably the world’s most viable and
promising addiction handling policy ever.
At
that time, provision of rehabilitation was based overwhelmingly on
Opioid Substitution Therapy (methadone and Subutex prescribing)
and 12 Steps Mutual Therapy Groups (both residential and
in-the-community), plus, in over 45 countries including the U.K.,
some Self-Help Residential Addiction Recovery Training Centres.
And
the first revelation of the new policy was that whilst
(a)
12 Steps had – over periods of years – an apparent 20 to 30%
chance of producing lasting abstinence - often with continued weekly
application,
(b)
N.H.S. O.S.T. prescribing was delivering only 3% of late-life
abstinence, whilst,
(c)
in three months across at least 45 nations, Self-Help Residential
Addiction Recovery Training was delivering 55 to 69+% of former
addicts comfortably abstinent for 9 months or more, and that they had
been doing so since 1966.
In
other words, with CONTINUING ABSTINENCE for its goal, the 2010
introduction of Payment by Results quickly revealed that there were
actually little or NO RESULTS from the “flagship” psycho-pharm
O.S.T. prescribing at an annual cost of over £47,000 per
addict, a BETTER RESULT from much less costly 12 Steps, and a
comfortably RELAXED LASTING ABSTINENCE RESULT from Self-Help
Residential Addiction Recovery Training - at a ONCE ONLY cost
of just over half the ANNUAL O.S.T. cost.
Rationally,
what these revelations should of course have achieved, was a
massive move away from O.S.T. prescribing and an equally large move
towards 12 Steps and the world’s main Providers of Self-Help
Residential Addiction Recovery Training – known as NARCONON®
- which was established in the Arizona State Prison System in 1966
and which has been expanding across the world ever since.
BUT
IT DIDN’T.
Solely
because the psycho-pharmaceutical fraternity didn’t want to lose
its highly lucrative O.S.T. methadone and buprenorphine prescribing
business which it had built up over the previous 62 years, and which
was costing the Government between £8.46 and £10.8 BILLIONS per
year across all government Departments, for the 40 year life of
the average prescribed methadone addict.
(Figures
obtained from the National Audit Bureau & Glasgow University)
Unfortunately
the Government were persuaded by psychiatric Professor Sir John
Strang’s psycho-pharm supporters that, because Payment by Results
was “a relatively new idea”, it ought to be tried out in practice
before being widely introduced.
Whilst
PbR is of course merely a “payment system”, in the addiction
recovery field it absolutely depends on first being able to
deliver the LONG TERM ABSTINENCE RESULT required by the Government.
So for his four year “pilot” of Payment by Results, Strang
quietly selected rehabilitation centres for his “pilots” which he
full well knew could seldom if ever actually deliver a lasting
abstinence RESULT.
Which
absence of results, after completion of his “pilots”, he
pronounced as an abject failure of the Payment by Results system,
rather than as a failure of the O.S.T. prescription “management”
system he had exclusively favoured and piloted.
It
should be noted that he carefully excluded from his “pilots“ the
one then 44 year established addiction recovery programme capable of
delivering enough addicts to relaxed abstinent results to make a
Payment by Results system actually WORK for the nation’s benefit.
Of
all the commentators observing and measuring the U.K. addiction
scene, the National Audit Bureau’s estimate of the cost of O.S.T.
prescribing is the lowest per annum, at over £47,000 per addict per
annum – likely for the next 40 years.
But
a competent Self-Help three months long Residential Addiction
Recovery Training Programme, when delivered on a Payment by Results
basis, is priced at a once only fee of £29,000, of which £20,000
remains UNPAID until, as and if, the various desired degrees
of relaxed lasting abstinence are achieved and medically approved by
physician examination at three, six and nine months from the start of
the Programme.
51
years of history across charitably run addiction recovery centres in
45 countries adequately demonstrates that a trained addict who has
comfortably abstained for six or nine month is seldom – IF EVER –
going to again become an addict.
Obviously,
because an addiction recovery training centre is a drug-free
environment, any addict in study is going to gain three months of
drug free living, or is going to fail, and in either event thus pay
for no more than his or her accommodation, bed, board, laundry and
toiletry costs, which have to be covered wherever they reside.
But
the following three months as well as the next three months prove
their relaxed abstinent condition and prove to the Commissioner that
the Provider merits staged payments of fees based solely on the
abstinence RESULTS achieved at each stage.
To
offset the biased result created by Sir John Strang’s previous four
year Payment by Results “pilots”, what is now required is a new
set of “pilots” over a similar period based on a three months, 51
year tried and tested, Self-Help Residential Addiction Recovery
Training Programme.
Insofar
as the psycho-pharm fraternity have already spent the last half
century trying to get rid of Self-Help Residential Addiction Recovery
Training in every possible unfair and underhand way, it is clear that
such a new set of pilots will be violently, overtly and covertly
resisted in every manner, because the psycho-pharms just do not want
our politicians to know the truth.
For
turnover and profit reasons, the psycho-pharms do not wish to deliver
cures for ILLEGAL addiction – mainly because they also CAN’T !
However,
they CAN cure INVOLUNTARY addiction to prescribed
medical drugs – but they seldom if ever do so,
and they resist having anyone else do it, by neglecting to
manufacture and provide the essential small-size drop-down dosages
which comfortable withdrawal from medical drugs absolutely
necessitates.
As
a result, any government moves or proposals to avoid
and / or cure either illegal or prescribed addiction will fail if
psychiatric or pharmaceutical advice is sought on these subjects,
because addiction in any of its forms is their favourite way of
capturing and retaining new consumers of drugs and psychiatric
services.
________________________________________
This
Report Prepared by S.A.F.E., the
Society
for an Addiction
Free
Existence
__________________________________
