EFFORTS to dramatically reduce the extent of drug misuse in Darlington are starting to pay off, health chiefs have claimed.

The town's Drug Interventions Programme (Dip) has reported a significant drop in the number of times criminals on the programme have been arrested.

The initiative was launched in February to try to break the link between drugs and crime.

It aims to prevent offending through early targeting of the area's most prolific offenders, who burgle, rob and steal to fund habits that can cost them up to £300 a week.

The project offers a range of different initiatives to deal with offenders as they are processed through the criminal justice system.

They include arrest referral schemes located in police custody suites, drug treatment and testing orders managed by the probation service, support schemes in prisons and medical treatment.

Chairman of Darlington's drug and alcohol addiction team, Bill Dixon, told a Dip seminar: "If you accept drugs are part of our culture they are going to become endemic and wreck lives, so I was really pleased to start looking at the problem differently, through Dip.

"If we are honest, we know we haven't yet cracked the problem, but we have turned things around."

The seminar attracted delegates from across the region.

They heard keynote speakers from Darlington Primary Care Trust, the police, the probation and prison services, Government Office North-East and a mental health trust.

Superintendent Andy Summerbell, of Durham Police, told delegates that 25 years ago it was unheard of to arrest someone on drugs offences. Today, however, police regularly came across people whose habits cost them £15,000-a-year.

Darlington care trust's assistant director of health improvement, Paul Davison, said that about 2,000 people a year died as a result of substance misuse and the average age was 34 for men and 39 for women.

"That's 75,000 years of life lost, which is a shocking figure," he said.

Darlington Dip manager Paul Walsh said: "We have managed to achieve a lot in a short space of time with a limited amount of money and some of what we are doing is innovative, some just makes sense. But we couldn't do it without working together."