SIIIIDDD! What about the farewell Druuuugggs?

Ya, it costs nothing to lock up a drug addict and there is no way they will ever get drugs in prison!

Never trust a junkie.
Never trust a junkie's service provider. [Checks pockets]

How much is a bullet?

5 cents

Knucklepopper: How much is a bullet?

For you, nothing. I'm buying.

FTFA: Last week there was outrage when it emerged that many treatment centres routinely offer addicts extra drugs - including heroin substitutes and anti-depressants - as a reward for providing drug-free urine samples.

I Blink'd. Then my eyes turned to dust.

"Let me take my drugs! I'm a GROWN-UP! Stop being such a NANNY STATE!"

(A few years later...)

"Help me! Drugs have ruined my life! Whaaa! Where's my state-sponsored rehab?"

I realize it's a couple months early for this quote, but: Let them go to the workhouses, or let them die and decrease the surplus population! Bah, Humbug!

lolkillpeoplepad

5000_gallons_of_toothpaste: Ya, it costs nothing to lock up a drug addict and there is no way they will ever get drugs in prison!

But at least we know where they are staying for the next 18 months.

.

Addicts treat themselves...they overdose.

you know, i bet you could just give them free drugs for 1/2 that.

you know, you could rent a cheap apartment and buy a lot of heroin for that kind of cash. In fact, if that £1.9 million number is to be believed, it'd be significantly cheaper to just give every addict free drugs.

But, I'm sure the moralists around here will insist that they like paying this as "any price is worth it".

m0llusk: Never trust a junkie.

But I need Just One Fix!

/a ministry thread would be more fun

You know, that much money in the hands of UNICEF could save several thousand lives.

Cost/Benefit analysis and all.

I doubt that figure takes into account the positive effect that person can have on the economy. An extra few decades of extra productivity, even at minimum wage, will be worth quite a bit.

Hey, go with what works.

many treatment centres routinely offer addicts extra drugs - including heroin substitutes and anti-depressants - as a reward for providing drug-free urine samples.

"I Can't Believe It's Not Smack!"

Headline and article misleading...

Spending on drug services in England rose by 50 per cent from £253 million in 2004-05 to £384 million last year, figures from the National Treatment Agency have revealed.
....
Around 195,000 people are officially counted as using addiction treatment services each year - a rise of 130 per cent since 1998.


Cost per patient:
384 000 000 / 195 000 = 1 969.23077

But many of those never attend appointments or quit in the first few weeks, and official figures show that fewer than three per cent go on to complete a course and a free of drug use at the end of it - down from 3.5 per cent three years ago.
....
But over the same period the numbers leaving treatment programmes 'clean' - having successfully beaten their addictions - crept up by just 1.2 per cent from 5,759 to 5,829.

Cst per patient that quits:
384 000 000 / 5 829 = 65 877.509

fanbladesaresharp: 5000_gallons_of_toothpaste: Ya, it costs nothing to lock up a drug addict and there is no way they will ever get drugs in prison!

But at least we know where they are staying for the next 18 months.

And when they get out, we spend a large chunk of money on chasing them down and prosecuting them.

tshetter:
Headline and article misleading...

I like the math the article does.

A massive £130 million funding boost for drug addiction treatment has led to only 70 more users quitting drugs

£130,000,000 increase, 70 additional quitters

(UK£ 130 million) / 70 = 1.85714286 million UK£ = 3.82181429 million U.S. dollars

Seems like a reasonable way to rate the funding increase.

/gotta love google calculator

tshetter: Headline and article misleading...

Ahh, the good old "lies, damn lies, and statistics".

as using addiction treatment services

That one jumps out at me, actually... I wonder what the criteria for "using a service" is. It's just screaming junk stats.

Like how, in the USA, the ONDCP likes to count anyone who ever mentions having used marijuana in an ER visit as "marijuana related emergencies", even if it was that you smoked the day before and are there on a broken leg...

/still cheaper to just give it to addicts
//removing the criminal syndicates is the key

How much does it cost to make a person dependent on a gov. approved drugs?Or is that OK cause some insur. co. pays...How does Heroin and Cocaine get in this country? Magic?
/Legalized
//organized
///Crime

Hmm, I wonder actually if it would be cheaper. I think the submitter was being facetious but this did get me thinking.

Cost of keeping an inmate in prison: $34k - 43k/year.
Cost of geriatric care for a prisoner (age 60+) about $69k/year.

So assuming arrest at age 21 for drug addiction and death at age 75, it'd be something like:

$2,327,000.00 - $2,669,000.00

Of course that's using today dollars and isn't adjusted for things like inflation or the increasing costs of energy, food and manual labor (guards, other prison staff).

So like, after converting pounds to dollars, it ends up being about $1.2 to $1.3 million dollars cheaper to incarcerate someone than to treat them.

Sounds like a win for the incarceration vs. treatment, right? Well kinda... The average person contributes over their lifetime something like a positive 5 million dollars worth of effect to the national economy. Now, while I took some econ classes I am far from an expert so I don't even have the faintest idea how to express that 5 million dollars in real terms contributions, but it does seem be a huge bonus for the treatment approach vs. the incarceration approach since incarcerated prisoners have pretty much no net benefit on the economy at all.


In any case... the article is really misleading. It doesn't actually cost that much to treat someone. That's just the amount of money they injected into their system that was divided by the number of the increase of people graduating the treatment program. It's flawed anyway (even if it does make a good headline) because it's unlikely that after one year of funding they are going to be able to capitalize on the extra funding anyway except as a way to get more people into treatment - something the reporter (journalist? lol) didn't bother to investigate.

For example, if the money was used to get more people into treatment, then the increase in people graduating isn't attributed to the effectiveness of the program at all, but to the fact that more people are being treated. They showed us a flat number to drive home their "cost per head" false analogy, but they neglected to show us percentages based on enrollment to show if there was an increase or decrease in the effectiveness of the treatment program.

Really, I think articles like this are exactly formulated by people in order to inspire the largest amount of outrage rather than actually reporting anything of substance. Hell even the facts and figures that they did provide were pretty useless.

subby fails at reading comprehension. The cost is for each completely clean user after the funding increase. It's not even considering the number of people who enrolled in programs or are currently enrolled in programs. The path to sobriety takes a while, and oftentimes people will go through a few times.

I don't think the article is that misleading. I think subby's an asshole. Whatever your opinion of govt sponsored rehab, at least be accurate.

as tshetter already pointed out, the cost per patient that uses the services is roughly 2,000 pounds. The cost per patient that quits is roughly 66,000 pounds. That, even with the funding increase, is infinitely cheaper than housing an inmate for ten or fifteen years, not to mention the productivity of a clean citizen vs an addicted inmate.

This isn't a liberal vs. conservative issue. This should be a common sense and economics issue. Unfortunately, even when people like subby look at costs, they pick the figures they want in order to make their point of view valid. How shocking, in this day and age, that conservatives would cherry pick information in order to advance their agendas!

TwistedFark: Really, I think articles like this are exactly formulated by people in order to inspire the largest amount of outrage rather than actually reporting anything of substance.

Judging by how many people in this thread immediately called for the murder of junkies as a quick an easy solution, I think this attempt at inspiring outrage has been successful.

I wonder if people realize how cheap legally produced generic heroin would be. I mean, when was the last time you worried about the price of a bulk-bottle of asprin or ibuprofen at Cosco? Drugs are cheap to make...

TwistedFark: It's flawed anyway (even if it does make a good headline) because it's unlikely that after one year of funding they are going to be able to capitalize on the extra funding anyway except as a way to get more people into treatment - something the reporter (journalist? lol) didn't bother to investigate.

Not to mention that the money might be getting used in different ways beyond just paying for the treatment of addicts. I don't know if there's public education campaigns involved (long term benefit), or if there's actually building of new infrastructure (building or stocking new clinics, again, long term benefit), or maybe the money went towards hiring new health care professionals (will they all be hired on the first day after the money arrives, or does the staff increase slowly over the course of that year).

Oh, and the whole thing about drug or drug substitutes. There are partial mu and kappa receptor agonists that keep the withdrawal at bay but use up the receptor so that even going out to shoot up heroin doesn't have an effect. Withdrawal from heroin isn't life-threatening, but it's a pain in the arse and can last a long time. Not to mention the myriad of psychological factors that are probably present in some of the people involved. There's a sample bias purely based on the fact that you have to be somewhat more messed up on average to become a heroin addict than a regular citizen.

Maybe some of that money should go into public psychiatric care or something.

/even if it cost 1.9 million dollars to treat an addict
//I'd much rather my tax money went to that than being literally put into pallets as cash and airdropped over iraq
///no, I'm not kidding, there's a report out there of the army airdropping literally millions of dollars in cash and no assurance that the right people got it and used it correctly.

How much extra do they contribute as functioning members of society?
Oh right, economic costs only work one way. I forgot.

just like iraq we are ahead of the game!

oren0: tshetter:
Headline and article misleading...

I like the math the article does.

A massive £130 million funding boost for drug addiction treatment has led to only 70 more users quitting drugs

£130,000,000 increase, 70 additional quitters

(UK£ 130 million) / 70 = 1.85714286 million UK£ = 3.82181429 million U.S. dollars

Seems like a reasonable way to rate the funding increase.

/gotta love google calculator

That is totally correct and I dont want to appear to be avoiding that point.

Im thinking that a funding increase doesnt result in immediate results in patients. Also how much was spent on more, err, secondary needs. ie, pr, ads, faclities..

The meds for clean piss thing....thats just all farked. If you are clean you arent using drugs or meds and therefore dont need meds.

Wonder how much they spend on meds per year...

Heroin For Peace: I wonder what the criteria for "using a service" is. It's just screaming junk stats.

This is exciting, my first 'grammar nazi' post.

criteria is the plural of criterian. Your sentence should read:

I wonder what the criteria for "using a service" are.

or

I wonder what the criterian for "using a service" is.


/sorry

Gotta hate drug-policy apologists.

there's a report out there of the army airdropping literally millions of dollars in cash and no assurance that the right people got it

The largest currency transfer in human history, and every last farking dollar of it was lost. About ten billion total, not million. It's no wonder the insurgency was able to spring up so quickly and effectively. The responsible parties should pay with their lives for that "little mistake."

Mommy?
Yes?
Whats that line up of people outside of the doctors office early in the morning?
Thats the rejects of civilization son.

Heroin For Peace: I wonder if people realize how cheap legally produced generic heroin would be. I mean, when was the last time you worried about the price of a bulk-bottle of asprin or ibuprofen at Cosco? Drugs are cheap to make...

LOL, that wouldn't happen. Boeringer-Mannheim would come up with Herospar XR, extended release heroin for every other day dosing, proven more effective in double blind trials than black tar!

Then they'd patent it and sell it for 300 bucks a hit. If you're over 65, medicare part D would cover it and would be forced to pay whatever price the pharm companies demanded.

Congress made it illegal for medicare to negotiate for drug prices for part D (the people who pushed the bill all retired and got multimillion dollar contracts with pharma afterwards). Even Hillary was in on it (at least she got more donations from pharma than any other democrat), but mostly it was a gift from the outgoing republican congress. Anyway, I hear that over the next ten years, this little golden piece of legislation will cost taxpayers 700+ billion dollars.

And we'd be complaining about how much to make somebody sober?

Previous congresses also made it mandatory for medicare to base their formularies on the effectiveness of drugs, but barred them from including cost efficiency in the measure. That means that if Herospar XR had 2% less overdoses than regular heroin, but cost 50 times more, medicare would still be obligated under congresses law (I believe it's the medicare modernization act or soemthing like that) to pick Herospar XR.

/I love our health care industry
//and our government.

sunlion: The largest currency transfer in human history, and every last farking dollar of it was lost. About ten billion total, not million. It's no wonder the insurgency was able to spring up so quickly and effectively. The responsible parties should pay with their lives for that "little mistake."

billions huh? sigh.

I heard about it on the radio on my way to work a while ago. Usually I look stuff up to get the numbers right and what not. In this case, I made it a point to not know about it too much because I knew I'd fly into a rage.

/farking impeach the mother farker already
//scratch that, impeach cheney first
///end threadjack

Capt.Kirk: Heroin For Peace: I wonder what the criteria for "using a service" is. It's just screaming junk stats.

This is exciting, my first 'grammar nazi' post.

criteria is the plural of criterian. Your sentence should read:

I wonder what the criteria for "using a service" are.

or

I wonder what the criterian for "using a service" is.


/sorry

+1 Obscure Grammar Nazi

Ya do learn something new everyday...
And forget something everynight too.

/ah well

OK, I've gotta go. Eight hours of lecture tomorrow. Oh joy!

/will be 200K dollars in debt by graduation
//no problem, I'm sure the Herospar XR pharm rep will spot me!
//I can haz some heroin adikt mony for loans??

sunlion: The largest currency transfer in human history, and every last farking dollar of it was lost. About ten billion total, not million.

Proof?

rga184: LOL, that wouldn't happen. Boeringer-Mannheim would come up with Herospar XR, extended release heroin for every other day dosing, proven more effective in double blind trials than black tar!

No way. It's been out of patent for so long that it'd be easy for companies to claim generic status. Just look at when Bayer was selling it all those years ago - I love to hate on "intellectual property" as much as anybody, but Bayer would have a real hard time defending this one.

Now... if they really did come up with some new version that was better? An different enough to actually deserve a new patent? Then go for it - they do it with all their other drugs, why not that one as well? The "traditional" form is still patent-free.

Besides - the whole "big pharma patent problem" is a whole other discussion entirely. As you mentioned, it's a problem for all new drugs. The thing is, heroin isn't a new drug (obviously). There will be competition in the market just like all the others in the long list of generics you can get.

Capt.Kirk: criteria is the plural of criterian

Ouch. Subject-verb agreement is usually one I get right. Now speeling, on the other hand...

Capt.Kirk: Heroin For Peace: I wonder what the criteria for "using a service" is. It's just screaming junk stats.

This is exciting, my first 'grammar nazi' post.

criteria is the plural of criterian. Your sentence should read:

I wonder what the criteria for "using a service" are.

or

I wonder what the criterian for "using a service" is.


/sorry

I knew that! except I thought it was spelled criterion. I didn't take latin in HS.

Also, data is plural, as in THESE data. singular is datum?

I'd just like to add, that on top of all the other statistical improprieties in submitter's faulty logic, he forgot to include the benefit to society of a productive member. The cost of keeping an inmate in prison should also include the opportunity cost of that same inmate being a productive member of society.

If there is any way I could fake being a junkie and get some kind of a slice of that, I'm in.

Heroin For Peace: No way. It's been out of patent for so long that it'd be easy for companies to claim generic status. Just look at when Bayer was selling it all those years ago - I love to hate on "intellectual property" as much as anybody, but Bayer would have a real hard time defending this one.

Oh, I know. I was just joking about the fact that somehow, in some really farked up way, the simple and cheap solution that you propose would end up costing us millions upon millions of dollars.

/ok, seriously going now...

rga184: Also, data is plural, as in THESE data. singular is datum?

I am a software developer and database designer and I still cant get used to the whole data/datum thing. Seems like it just popped up in the past few years. Screw it, I always say 'data' and whatever verb/adverb sounds right for the sentence....and as far as "THESE data" goes, I will be dead before I think that way naturally.

Capt.Kirk: I am a software developer and database designer

so you're really getting a kick out of these replicata?

rga184: I thought it was spelled criterion.

Oh your right! Damn, my grammar past failed.