Mark Easton's Blog

Mark Easton, the BBC's Home Affairs reporter, has had a series of interesting posts on his blog: on the growth, decade-by-decade, of births outside marriage , on heroin, heroin, where's Afghanistan's heroin, and on drug treatment programmes in the UK:

The National Treatment Agency prefer to focus on the number in treatment and the number retained for 12 weeks - the government's measures of success. There is no target for getting people off drugs. [Scott -- with the Blairite focus on targetting, doesn't this say everything, the one thing they haven't set a target for?] If pressed, they will argue that the data shows that those who left drug-free represent 11% of those who were discharged from treatment. That looks a bit better. But do you see what they've done? They have ignored the tens of thousands of people who are in drug treatment but were not discharged.