The Vietnamese parliament has cancelled a drug rehabilitation programme after a damning assessment of its effectiveness during its five years of operation.

The decision was made at last week's National Assembly (NA) Standing Committee session, after the Post-Rehabilitation Job Training Programme was subjected to bitter criticism from lawmakers.

Introduced in 2003, the programme was designed to reduce the number of relapsing addicts by isolating them from the community while they undertook vocational training courses.

Under the programme, drug addicts first undergo residential rehabilitation for one to two-years as regulated by the Anti-Drug Law.

At the end of the programme, they spend one to three-years receiving job training at vocational centres.

The programme was adopted on a pilot basis by seven provinces and cities, with HCM City the most enthusiastic.

Over the past five years, the southern metro has spent 1.2 trillion dong (US$75 million) on post-rehab job training for 32,000 people, about 20 times the total number of beneficiaries in the other six provinces and cities combined.

The city claimed earlier this year, that only 6% of the 10,000 people who had returned to their families after the job training period had relapsed.

About 70% of programme graduates had found employment, HCM City authorities said.

But legislators and the media, however, have not been so supportive of the programme.

With only six months elapsing since the first batch of job trainees re-integrated in to the community, most commentators said it was too early to judge the relapse rate.

They said the touted 6% relapse rate was only based on the number of cases discovered by police.

The deputy minister of Public Securities estimated the relapse rate could be as high as 80%.

The employment figure appeared unreliable, too.

The Nhi Xuan Industrial Park, which had employed nearly 800 people from the programme, said early this year that 580 of them had quit.

Taking into account the huge investment and the outcome, vice NA speaker Uong Chu Luu said "the result was poor."

Le Hieu Dang, deputy chair of the local committee of

Fatherland Front, an umbrella organisation for social and political groups in Vietnam, said the investment was "not worth it."

"The city [administration] has carried out the programme without proper (preparatory) studies," Dang said.

"I'm highly suspicious of the report that 70% of post-rehab people could find a stable job."

Due to their low academic achievement level, most people under residential treatment were only trained in simple skills such as carpentry and embroidery, Dang said.

Their poor health also meant low productivity.

"Unemployment or unstable employment could drive them back to drugs," he said.

The programme was originally expected to become the replacement for a previous attempt, a so-called "anti-relapse at communities" project in which grass-root administrations helped post-rehab patients reintegrate in the community. This programme was deemed to have failed miserably.

But the expense has been the Achilles' heel of the new programme.

Under the Anti-Drug Law, both the mandatory residential rehab and post-rehab vocation training are free of charge.

Le Bach Hong, deputy minister of Labour, War Invalids and Social Affairs, said the government's budget was so tight it could only afford to offer nine months of the one-to-two-year rehab period.

The budget could not stretch to the training component, she said.

The prohibitive cost would also prevent poor provinces from administering the programme properly, according to Vu Hung Vuong, deputy head of the Ministry of Public Security's Police Bureau.

The northern mountainous province of Cao Bang, for example, could afford only three-month vocational courses while its neighbour Son La Province's vocational facilitates could house just 2,000 out of 12,000 post-rehab people, he said.

The leaders of HCM City, however, still passionately support the programme.

They have even asked for it to be extended beyond the planned deadline of August 1 this year.

HCM City People's Committee deputy Chair Nguyen Thanh Tai said without the programme, "100% of post-rehab people would relapse."

He said the two-year mandatory rehab period was not enough to prevent relapse.

Even "anti-relapse at communities" had also failed in more than 90% of rehab cases in the city, Tai said.

"The investment was not wasted," Tai said.

Without it, in the past five years "the number of crimes could have been 20,000 instead of 16,000 and the number of addicts could have increased to hundreds of thousands."

The parliament will now have to consider alternatives to prevent drug addiction and relapse in the country.

According to official figures in February, Vietnam had about 170,000 drug users, more than 68% of whom are aged under 30.

The number of drug users increased by 9,000 a year between 1996 and 2006.

One alternative that has been placed on the table is, ironically, the programme's above doomed "anti-relapse at communities" predecessor.

But this time, many experts suggested that more money be spent on improving the quality of grass-root level staff in charge of helping post-rehab people integrate in the community.

The staff should also be paid better, they said.

The Fatherland Front's Dang said the staff were now "working hard and even facing danger for just 200,000 dong (US$12.50)" a month.