Drug treatment
The current 2009 – 2012 EU Drugs Action Plan (specifically objective 7) calls on Member States to improve the availability, accessibility and quality of drug treatment.
Similarly, in all Member States, drug treatment is considered as a key element of their National drug strategies in the field of demand reduction for illicit drugs.The tasks of the EMCDDA comprise the monitoring of the state of the drugs problem and of the responses applied to drug related problems, including drug treatment, and to support the exchange of best practice between Member States. The EMCDDA is furthermore charged with the development of tools and instruments to facilitate the Member States’ and the Commission’s monitoring and evaluation of their respective drugs policies.
The latest Drug treatment overviews of the availability of drug-related treatment are available for 30 countries - the 27 EU Member States, Norway as EMCDDA member, and Turkey and Croatia as Candidate Countries.
The drug treatment overviews consist of five main parts:
- description of the national context, i.e. overall drug treatment system and organisation;
- description of treatment registries and monitoring systems available in each country;
- current treatment demand data including new clients entering treatment for the first time and a breakdown by primary drug;
- availability and provision of treatment services in the country, with a specific focus on substitution treatment;
- references and additional resources.
The overviews are based primarily on data from standard tables on drug treatment and national reports. They have been developed with the assistance of the Reitox national focal points.
For a comprehensive overview on drug treatment systems, availability and utilisation in Europe, please consult the 2008 online report on ‘Quality of treatment services in Europe - drug treatment - situation and exchange of good practice’ published by the Directorate General for Health and Consumers.
To see the development of treatment availability between 1999 and 2002/2003 in the EU 15, please see snapshot.
To download the overview report of drug treatment and its availability in the EU Member States and Norway around year 1999/2000 click here (430KB).
The EMCDDA's Evaluation Instruments Bank is a document archive of tools created to encourage evaluation using reliable methods, and to help to standardise these tools at European level. The Instruments Bank contains tools for evaluating both prevention and treatment programmes. By entering the specific criteria of the intervention to be evaluated, the database provides the user with the most suitable evaluation tool, together with comments on its use and references to related studies.
The Evaluation Instruments Bank is continuously updated and now holds 170 evaluation instruments in the treatment field and 70 in the prevention field - it now holds a total of 19 languages (17 EU languages - Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian,Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Slovenian, Slovakand Swedish - plus Norwegian and Russian).
You can access the EIB by clicking here.
The EMCDDA has collaborated with the WHO and the UNDCP on the production of eight 'Workbooks on Evaluation of Psychoactive Substance Use Disorder Treatment'. These workbooks cover eight different types of evaluation spanning from needs assessment over process evaluation to economic evaluation. The aim of the workbooks is to educate and train decision-makers, programme planners, staff and others about the evaluation of drug treatment services. Using the workbooks are thus a way of facilitating the work for them and for enhancing their capacities to carry out evaluation activities.
Insights 3 on substitution treatment
Insight number 3 on substitution treatment provides national overviews for the then 15 EU member states as well as a pan-European overview chapter on the situation around the turn of the millennium. The Insight maps European practice in substitution treatment and sheds light on different approaches to substitution treatment interventions across Europe. It furthermore explored substitution treatment systems, its legal basis, and their capacity as well as assessed the status of substitution treatment evaluation in the EU Member States and at European level. It is published as EMCDDA Insights Series No. 3, 'Reviewing current practice in drug-substitution treatment in the European Union'.
An executive summary is available online - to obtain the full publication, consult the ordering information.
