To ask the Secretary of State for Health what proportion of visits to accident and emergency departments related to patients requiring treatment where the primary or secondary diagnosis was excessive alcohol consumption in each of the last five years. (232136)

The information requested is not collected centrally.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health how much was spent by the NHS on drugs to combat alcohol dependency in each of the last 10 years. (232139)

There are a number of drugs that can be used to treat, or that are used in the treatment of alcohol dependency. However, the vast majority of these drugs are used to treat a range of other conditions and data on their use cannot be broken down to show use by disease group, therefore providing these data would be misleading.

However, disulfiram (Antabuse) and acamprosate (Campral) are used only in the treatment of alcohol dependency and the following table gives the cost of prescriptions of these drugs over the last 10 years.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health what recent estimate he has made of the incidence of alcohol and cocaine poly-addiction. (232140)

The National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse's National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS), collects local data about individuals in structured drug treatment and the treatment they receive.

The NDTMS reports that in 2007-08, 7,497 individuals, in specialist drug treatment, reported cocaine as one of their top three problem substances, with alcohol as either a second or third problem substance at the point of triage/initial assessment.

The NDTMS only records data for clients in specialist drug treatment in England and it excludes those whose primary problem is with alcohol.

Since April 2008, all providers of specialist alcohol treatment have been asked to submit data to the NTA's National Alcohol Treatment Monitoring System on clients receiving specialist treatment for their alcohol misuse, however, these data are not currently robust enough for reporting purposes. Therefore, it is likely that the figure above underestimates the number of individuals addicted to both alcohol and cocaine in England.

It is only possible to collect data on those individuals who are addicted to both alcohol and cocaine when they enter treatment, therefore the data above take no account of those with poly-addiction who were not participating in treatment.