The news in yesterday's Royal Gazette that Caron, a US-based drugs rehabilitation group, is setting up an assessment centre in Bermuda to help people with substance abuse problems should be welcomed.

Bermuda's history of drugs treatment is, sadly, riddled with good intentions but poor results. That is not to say that there have not been success stories and some local programmes have successes they should be proud of. But there are not enough treatment programmes locally and no one in the treatment field would say that the success rate is adequate.

The backers of Caron Bermuda may well be right in believing that it is is futile to attempt to reinvent the wheel with local residential treatment centres when there are excellent — and possibly cheaper — alternatives overseas.

This is hardly a new approach. Many Bermudian addicts have been sent abroad for treatment in the past, and to be fair, the results have been mixed. Very often this has been blamed not on the rehab centres themselves but on the "after care" or lack thereof that recovering addicts receive on their return to the Island.

Too often, recovering addicts return home full of the best intentions to stay clean, work and get their lives back on track. But when they return to their old neighbourhoods and haunts and feel the pressures of every day life, it is easy to fall back, unless there is good support and after care for them.

Then too, Bermuda is too small to avoid old "friends" and places. It may well be possible in other, larger countries to start life over, far away from the people and places that a person associates with their addiction, but that is much harder to do here.

That's why the after care that Caron says it will provide is absolutely crucial.

As Caron clinical coordinator Charles Farmer said: "For so long now, I've watched addicts and alcoholics travel overseas for treatment of the disease of addiction, only to find that no structured support system exists when they return home."

It is absolutely essential that recovering addicts get the help they need, and it is important for families to be there for their relatives, for landlords to make housing available and for employers to provide meaningful and rewarding work.

Too often recovering addicts are written off before they have a chance to show that they are clean, and the result is that they quickly fall back into the spiral of addiction, thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is good to see that Social Rehabilitation Minister Dale Butler has thrown his weight behind this initiative and that the private sector appears to be ready to fund it. The other great problem with rehabilitation services in the past has been the high level of infighting between different agencies. The only losers then are addicts — who should be the priority.