Home, family and country: The cost of addiction
How much does drug and alcohol abuse cost the country? Can we address addiction better to improve the economy? What works – and what doesn’t?
We’re familiar by now with the individual picture of addiction. Often misrepresented in the media and avoided in reality, the personal hell experienced by adults across the country brings with it a very real and tangible impact on our wider society.
With over 268,000 adults in 2017 in contact with drug and alcohol support services, the cost of addiction is weighed in families affected, careers derailed and lives lost. All these side-effects of substance abuse and dependency feed into our country’s economy, painting a stark picture in favour of investment in government-funded rehabilitation support and education.
The barrier of entry
On an individual level, the impact of lack of government-funded support is felt daily by addicts and those dependent on substances. Local Authorities have steadily seen investment in NHS rehabilitation grants reduced over the years, with individuals now only being considered for government-funded rehabilitation after a competitive and lengthy appraisal process wherein the addict must prove unequivocally that they are beyond saving themselves – a harsh distinction which excludes a significant portion of adults in the UK struggling with varying degrees of substance misuse each day.
With over 18,000 hospital admissions in the UK recorded in 2018 and close to three thousand deaths due to drug misuse, the prohibitive cost of residential rehabilitation services leaves many adults unable to access the rehabilitation support they desperately need to get their lives back on track. This growing gap in rehabilitation services in the UK has contributed to our public health crisis, stymying our economy.
Working addiction and substance abuse
It’s not, after all, just the homeless or unemployed who are addicts. Working professionals abuse drugs and alcohol every day, with 43% of UK staff having been tested in studies as positive for drug use. The impact of drug and alcohol misuse is felt by employers too, with similar studies finding 27% of employers as identifying substance misuse as a tangible problem in their workplace.
Employee Assistance Programmes, often touted as an ‘all size fits one’ packaged solution for employee wellbeing, invariably fail to include the specialist kind of addiction support required to make a real difference. Even when an EAP is of suitable quality to substantially help a working professional struggling with addiction, it’s rarely used; some 3-5% of workers in the UK will ever actually make use of an EAP even when it is available to them and beneficial for them to do so.
Return on investment
The government itself published materials in 2018 to aid Local Authorities to argue the case for greater investment in their regions in addiction prevention and education. Estimating the social and economic impact of drugs and alcohol at a staggering £21.5 billion, these resources further claimed the return on investment in drug and alcohol misuse prevention to be £4 for every £1 invested.
Despite these clear findings, the picture of addiction in the UK in 2020 is one of poor support at a government level, with addicts and substance misusers lacking access to education and rehabilitation at a price-point and flexible schedule they can realistically afford.
Addressing the need
With this difficulty in mind, private rehabilitation services are evolving to meet the gap and fill it. The struggles of adults in the UK who are dependent on drugs and alcohol are clear: residential rehabilitation is too expensive, and work and family life cannot be put on hold just so that a programme can be attended. Life must continue, and the inflexibility of traditional residential rehab effectively makes it unavailable to the ‘average’ adult in the UK.
Intensive outpatient programmes such as Help Me Stop’s ‘Dayhab’ drug and alcohol rehab programme, available flexibly in-person and as an all-online alternative, seek to support adults who cannot afford residential rehabilitation or attend it full-time. Blending a mixture of traditional 12-step and SMART methodology which has long been a part of traditional rehabilitation, intensive outpatient programmes like these are incorporating modern tools such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to push the envelope on accessible and successful addiction treatment.
