Methadone

Methadone is a substances used to help people who are trying to come off Heroin.  It works as a substitute and helps to stop the symptoms of “Cold Turkey”.  It does work in a similar way to Heroin but it very heavily controlled and is regulated in where you can get it and take it.  So where can you get it from?  Mainly from Pharmacies, and you have to be refered to get it.  Which, when you get down to it, is actually a good thing.  So why bring it up here?  Well, part of what do they know is Pharmacies as they form part of the NHS.  You can only ask them questions about their NHS work (Which is fair enough, because you can't exactly ask Tescos for their long term business plan, can you?).

This post started as a bit of a joke for me (Because looking through the list of pharmacy's I noticed Tescos and thought it would be funny to find that you could get Tesco value methadone) but turned into something a bit more than that.  I therefore asked the same question to all of them, which was:

Does your company distribute methadone to recovering heroin addicts as part of its NHS duties?

I got a mixed bag of answers (Apparently the FoI is not something that applies to them), but the best I got was from Day Lewis Plc in which they stated that:

Any pharmacy in the UK which has an NHS contract is obliged to dispense methadone to any patient that presents a valid NHS prescription for it…

And thus answering all of the other requests as well.  So why is this interesting?  Well, it also shows that it is something that is being address.  So how much is being spent on it?  And that is where the FoI request helps us, because we can ask all the trusts, in Wales, the following question:

Please can you tell me how much money (since 2010) has your authority spend on Methadone to recovering Heroin users.

The answers are:

Name	Amount
Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board	£685,795
Hywel Dda Local Health Board	£360,680
Cwm Taf Local Health Board	£2.798m
Cardiff and Vale University Local Health Board
Betsi Cadwaladr University Local Health Board	£1,901,496.03

That’s pretty cool!  Again this is not at the end of the story.  There are a lot of other things that we can look at on this matter too. Public Health Wales NHS Trust has a very special system which looks at people with substance misuse issue.  It is one of the few unified policies in the UK.  how much have they spent on this?  Time will tell…  A quick check of the website also shows these little diamonds.  A lot of cool stuff to show how drugs are being tackled.