It is inevitable that the first reaction to the 50 percent cut in Government funding to the Salvation Army for its Harbour Lights and Life Skills programmes is disappointment.

As the Army has stated, Harbour Lights is the longest-lasting and arguably most successful residential rehabilitation centre in Bermuda.

At first glance, it appears that a programme is again being punished for its very success.

In the last two decades ? going back well before 1998 when the Progressive Labour Party took power ? Government has spent millions of dollars on anti-drugs programmes and it is often difficult to determine whether the spending has been successful.

In the last year, the Council Partners, which acted as a fundraising umbrella organisation, disbanded, in large part due to intractable problems with the National Drugs Commission.

Now the NDC is cutting funds to a successful programme, and essentially saying, find the money on your own or close.

In a statement issued by the Health Ministry and the NDC yesterday, the Government said the reason for the funding cut was that the disbanding of the Council Partners meant that the NDC had to make for the loss of $1 million in private funding.

As a result, some programmes that had been funded by the Government would see cuts, in spite of the fact that Health Minister Patrice Minors said last November that she was confident that Government could meet the shortfall.

The Government also stated that the Salvation Army had been warned from July, 2003 that it would see "material" cuts in funding and was advised to seek funds from alternative sources. That would seem to be a decent amount of notice ? except the Army was not told just how deep the cuts would go until this April.

"Material" could mean anything from ten percent up. It is not clear that the Salvation Army was ever told to expect hundreds of thousands of dollars in cuts.

To be sure, the Salvation Army remains, according to the NDC, one of its highest grant recipients. The NDC also has a policy of funding agencies up to 50 percent of their requirements, a policy from which the Salvation Army alone has been exempt until now, it said.

It is worth noting, however, that the Army was one of the few programmes that did not take money from the Council Partners, at least in recent years. Now it is the Army that will lose its funding because the NDC needs the money to fund those programmes that were dependent on the Council Partners.

The Government statement added: "The simple fact is that the NDC on its own is not a bottomless source of funding. If treatment agencies wish to run programmes they need to look to partner not only with Government sources of during but corporate sponsorship as well.

"It would behoove them to drive that process in a society that has been epitomised by generous corporate sponsorship as opposed to waiting for a handout."

This gives the impression that the Salvation Army and other organisations run treatment centres for fun and the NDC is doing them a favour by providing funding to them.

Drug treatment is done because there is a crying need for it. there is something offensive in the notion that the Salvation Army is somehow feeding off Government.

The NDC also forgets that corporate sponsorship is not a bottomless source either, and that the closure of the Council Partners came in large part because of dissatisfaction from corporate donors with the way the NDC itself was being managed.

It also ignores the fact that the Army already raises large amounts of money from the companies and private individuals to run the plethora of vital programmes that come under its umbrella, apart from drug treatment.

Its May Red Shield Appeal alone raises $500,000 a year, $150,000 of which goes to Harbour Lights. Just how much further is it supposed to go?

In the end, Government's decision ? and its failure to raise the NDC's budget in the wake of the Council Partners' closure ? raises more questions than it answers about Government's commitment to getting people off drugs.