text: The Drug Interventions Programme (DIP) was introduced in April 2003 with the aim of 
  developing and integrating measures for directing adult drug-misusing offenders into drug 
  treatment and reducing offending behaviour. Offenders charged with certain ‘trigger offences’ 
  (mostly acquisitive crime or drug offences) were drug tested and those testing positive were 
  required to have a drug treatment assessment. 
  
  This section contains a series of descriptive statistics taken from the DIP dataset covering the 
  years from 2004 to 2013. The particular focus is on analysis that can shed light on trends and 
  characteristics for new opiate or crack-cocaine users (OCUs). Because it is a dataset predicated 
  on involvement with the criminal justice system it is only representative of a subset of OCUs: 
  those who have been arrested or charged with an offence – mostly an acquisitive crime offence 
  (around 85 per cent of the offences leading to a positive drugs test are acquisitive6). Research 
  has shown that up to half of all OCUs commit little or no acquisitive crime (Gossop et al, 2003; 
  Morgan, 2014). So the analysis in this section provides only a guide to the numbers, trends and 
  characteristics for the total number of new OCUs. But it does provide a helpful picture for the 
  crime-involved subset of new OCUs. 