The Netherlands Drug Situation 2010 - Trimbos-instituut

treatment for drug addiction. "Labelled drug-related public expenditure" is defined as"the direct expenditure explicitly labelled as related to illicit drugs by the general governmentof the state" (Prieto 2010). This author further argues that "from a drug policyperspective labelled expenditure is more relevant than unlabelled expenditure". If acountry spends a million euro on drug policy, what difference does it make whether ornot that million was labelled beforehand to be spent on drugs? According to Prieto (2010)it does make a difference because "labelled expenditure is proactive, in that it is linked tothe achievement of specific policy aims, while unlabelled expenditure is reactive, in that itarises as a result of drug misuse, such as enforcement or health costs".However, the policy trend during the past years in the Netherlands, as in many otherMember States of the European Union, has been in the opposite direction of decentralizationand labelling public expenditures less and less beforehand. The more and more amunicipality, at the local level, becomes responsible to take care for its own drug addicts,the less and less a national government can label beforehand which amount of funding isto be spent on the drug issue. Moreover, for a concrete drug addict receiving a certainamount of expenditure in the form of addiction care, it will make no real differencewhether that expenditure was labelled beforehand or not.Nonetheless, labelled or not labelled, the actual expenditures by the main institutes foraddiction care in the Netherlands are retrievable from their annual accounts. It should benoticed that the addiction care included in these expenditures, apart from care for drugaddiction, also includes care for alcohol addiction, medicines addiction, gambling addiction,and other addictions. Table 1.3.1 gives an overview of these expenditures in thefiscal years 2008 and 2009. From this table it can be estimated that the annual expendituresof the main regular institutes for addiction care, together with the institutes forintegrated addiction care and mental health care, in 2008 amounted to 1,332,960,533euro, which increased to a total of 1,472,928,984 euro in 2009. Unfortunately, it is notdirectly clear which part of these amounts is spent on treating addiction, let alone drugaddiction, and which amount is still missing from the non-merged mental health care. Itwill come as no surprise that a high correlation has been found between the expendituresof an institute and its number of clients. There is a correlation of 0.986 between the expendituresin 2008 and the total case load at the end of the year.28