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Rehabilitation programmes for drug misusers must be more responsive and education initiatives should be extended to parents and carers, a fringe meeting on drugs strategy heard last week.

Ruth Henig, Lancashire councillor and chairperson of the Association of Police Authorities, said many heroin and crack misusers gave up on kicking their habits because rehabilitation treatment was not available quickly enough.

She said treatment needed to be administered within 24 hours of an addict expressing an interest in receiving it, otherwise the window of opportunity would be lost.

Of the 25,000 people referred for rehabilitation treatment last year only 25 per cent finished the course, whereas this figure rose to 75 per cent for patients receiving treatment within 24 hours.

A lack of support for prisoners who undergo rehabilitation once they have been released back into the community was also hindering those most vulnerable to slipping back into addiction, Henig said.

She said that although 90 per cent of schools had a drug education policy, the number of children who experimented with drugs was not falling. She said drug education initiatives should be extended to carers and parents in an effort to break the cycle of experimentation.