CAMPAIGNERS have welcomed police plans to carry out the first official research into drug rape.

The Roofie Foundation, which is based in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, and is Britain's only specialist drug rape agency, said the proposals were long overdue.

Chief executive Graham Rhodes said: "We are quite delighted. Any research, anything that gives an accurate showing of the facts, has got to be welcome.

"There's been a lot of reluctance to recognise this as a serious problem and for years we've said it is about time the Home Office did something."

Senior police officers have expressed concerns that there are no official statistics on drug-assisted rape.

Derbyshire Police's Detective Chief Superintendent David Gee, who is spearheading the initiative called Operation Matise, said: "We want to put some meat on the bones of this problem.

"It is a problem but we don't know what the prevalence of the problem is."

The Roofie Foundation, which is run by volunteers, is the only organisation which has collected statistical information about drug rape.

Since it was set up in 1997, its helpline has received more than 6,000 calls, 522 of them from the North-East.

The new research will be carried out by nine specialist sexual assault referral centres (SARCS), including REACH which is run by Northumbria Police and has centres in Sunderland and Newcastle.

The centres will assess how much the symptoms related to drug-assisted rape are caused by alcohol, recreational drugs or prescribed drugs.

Mr Rhodes welcomed the work to be done by the SARCS but said it was important to include cases reported to police at genito-urinary clinics and hospital accident and emergency units.

He said: "It has to be a co-ordinated approach or we won't get the full picture."

Several campaigns have been launched to tackle the problem of drug rape, where free testing kits have been given out to revellers so they can checks their drinks during a night out.

But, while there have been proven cases of drinks being spiked, no reliable figures have ever been produced.

Operation Matise is expected to begin in August or September.

It is expected that the results will be known next year.