The government (a.k.a Tony and Jack), like many drug users, has finally got sick of the state of the English drug treatment system. Its long waiting lists, the enormous variations in treatment you get between drug services in one district and the next and the overall piss-poor quality of many services nationally. To end what it calls "the postcode lottery" (that is, where you live determines the kind of treatment you get and whether you get any treatment at all) and to ensure drug services deliver quality treatments that ‘work’ (i.e. methadone), it is setting up something called the National Treatment Agency.

By the way don’t think for a moment that this has anything to do with your health or welfare, it’s so the government can make sure there’s a treatment agency in your area that you can be sent to if you get nicked. Like much else this government has done in the drugs field recently, it’s something Tony and Jack (or in reality one of their advisers) has dreamed up. There’s even a recognisable process to it now.
There’s a press announcement from No 10 or the Home Office. The Drugs Tsar, his Deputy and all the rest of the suits look embarrassed or gobsmacked when journalists ask them about the new measure, because it’s the first time they’ve heard of it. Then, within 24 hours, they’re talking so confidently about the latest wheeze, you’d think it had been in the national drugs strategy from the beginning. And this is how the National Treatment Agency (NTA from now on) came into existence.

This is a much more complicated thing than the other stuff they’ve made up, so the details have taken longer to work out. But, as things stand at the moment, it looks as though this agency will have the power to make sure that the new money that’s coming down for treatment will actually end up being spent on treatment. It also looks as though they will set minimum standards for treatment and that they will have the power to make poor services ‘buck up or fuck off’. None of this would make a great deal of difference if there weren’t now lots of money coming into treatment, starting this April. If your local treatment service doesn’t buck up and your local DAT can’t/won’t make it, then lack of money is no longer an excuse.

We took the piss out of the NTA in our last issue because all we knew about it was that it was going to buy rehab places nationally. But that was all anyone knew about it then. The stuff above has only emerged in the last couple of months. So we are going to wait and see on this one. It’s definitely needed. A look around at the state of treatment in many parts of England and Wales confirms that. And the way money for drug treatment gets siphoned off into other things would make a group of Miami money launderers green with envy. Someone has to stop the diversion of drug treatment money and its waste. Although, as we said in the editorial, this doesn't apply to the Government itself. You see, because they made the NTA up on the spot, they never thought to set aside any money for it. So what they've done in the last few weeks is to nick £4 million quid out of the new treatment moneys to pay for their agency which, among other things, will er prevent treatment money being siphoned off for other purposes. Makes sense, doesn't it? Yet it's good to know that (however unwittingly) its junkies who have funded it indirectly.

So, as its drug users who are funding it,m we’d like Monkey, and especially its readers, to help the new agency in its job. Now there’s the money coming in over the next 3 years to fund treatment this is something worth doing. As soon as the Agency gets started in April and we know what the set up will be, we’ll print a form in the appropriate issue of Monkey that will allow you to give information to the NTA (copy to your local Drug Action Team) on waiting lists in your area, prescribing practices and quality of service provided. That way the NTA can have another source of information besides the stuff it gets from your local DAT. We’ll put a heading on it. Something like ‘Junkies and the NTA: A Partnership Approach to Improving Services’ and make it look all posh and official. We’ll give you their address and you can fill it in either anonymously or with details and send it off. It’s only the price of a second class stamp and think what a difference you might make.

But just in case anyone should think we’ve gone soft in the head, welcoming something this bunch of intolerant, gospel grinding, electoral opportunists have set up, here’s a few other observations to be going on with. The NTA , it goes without saying, is another job creation measure. A recent hog call in the Guardian newspaper offered a pail of swill worth £110, 000 a year for a Chief Executive for the new agency. And the overall size of the trough will be big, with plenty of jobs in London and even some in the provinces. All with large salaries. Suited pigs are already jostling around the feeder rim to get their snouts in. Our readers may be unemployed but they make sure plenty of other people are in work. Also, there is the small matter of user consultation. Not a word about the consumers of drug services in any of the consultation documents. This despite all the stuff in NHS documents about putting patients first and the ‘Best Value’ approach in local government that says consumers of public services should be consulted. Never mind. We can help make up for that as time goes by. Maybe we’ll run a confidential ‘Shop a DAT’ line? After all, it was cash intended for us that set the fucking thing up. We should have a say.