Malta facility has highest clients rate

Malta's methadone maintenance facility had the highest rate of clients by far - 257.59 per 100,000 inhabitants - among EU accession countries in 2001, according to a new report.

The facility, which opened in 1987, is also among the longest established in the countries involved in the study, "Report on the drug situation in the candidate central and eastern European countries". In 2000, the Malta facility had 935 clients.

A methadone maintenance facility is where drug victims are given methadone under the observation of doctors to stabile their chaotic condition.

Malta was followed by Slovenia, which had 67.72 clients per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000, and Lithuania which catered for 15.42 clients per 100,000 inhabitants. While the given number of Malta clients per 100,000 applied to the year 2001, that for the other countries was in relation to 2000.

The other countries involved in this section of the study were Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

Asked about the high rate of clients attending Malta's facility when compared to other countries, George Grech, the clinical director of Sedqa - the national agency against drug and alcohol abuse, said Malta was reaching most of the drug taking population.

Other countries lacked Malta's facilities and the facilities they had were not as accessible as in Malta. Malta's facilities were accessible to all who wanted to use them and were within reach.

Dr Grech said treatment success could be gauged and the more people were engaged in treatment the less the risk of overdose and HIV.

The report criticised the data collection methods in most countries.

"Only the Czech Republic and Poland provide estimates based on statistical procedures.

"Estimates from Bulgaria and Latvia are based on a combination of rough multiple calculation methods, surveys and snowball sampling.

"Data from Malta are based on general population surveys, a method which fails to target the relevant groups and thus tends to underestimate."

When it came to problem drug use estimates, the report said this could be estimated as rather high in the Baltic states (above one per cent of inhabitants aged 15 to 64), whereas in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Malta and Slovenia, prevalence equated with the average EU level of plus or minus 0.5 per cent.

The report said that as with problem drug use, information about treatment demands differed substantially, in both quality and coverage, between countries.

It said that data obtained from Slovakia, Malta, Estonia and Lithuania covered public health and state treatment facilities but failed to adequately cover non-governmental organisations and/or low threshold facilities.

The latest edition of the "Drugs in Focus" series issued concurrently with the report by the EU drugs agency in Lisbon states that EU candidate countries have become "a clear target for drug consumption".

It says that in most candidate countries "recreational drug use and experimentation are increasingly becoming an integral part of youth culture".

"There has been an increase in experimental drug use in the general population in all CEECs in the past 10 years".

The trend was particularly visible in schools, where the number of pupils aged 15 to 16 who have tried any illicit drug at least once, doubled between 1995 and 1999.

It said that whereas in the EU the population of problem drug users was largely stable and aging, in the majority of candidate countries the phenomenon was newer and problem drug users were generally younger.

It was essential for candidate countries to strengthen their drug coordination and information mechanisms and allocate, where appropriate, adequate resources to them.