The head of a Bradford drugs agency whose workload more than doubled last year today said more must be done for the city's addicts.

Yvonne Oliver, director of the Buttershaw-based Ripple project, called for more psychotherapeutic treatment to be made available in the district, giving users the best chance possible of kicking their habits.

The charity has seen its client base, workload and turnover virtually double over each of the five years it has been operating.

Its latest figures showed the number of people in its clinical treatment had jumped from 357 to 787 in little more than 12 months.

And a sample of users showed each of them took a wide variety of different drugs ranging from alcohol to heroin.

The vast majority used both heroin and crack, the group's annual report showed.

But Mrs Oliver said although crack use was increasing, the rising numbers on the Ripple's books reflected more people seeking treatment rather a large jump in the number of addicts in Bradford.

Among the treatments offered are prescriptions for the heroin substitute methadone and structured courses of day care.

Mrs Oliver said while methadone offered 'harm reduction' and stopped addicts relying on crime to buy heroin, the most effective method of helping them kick the habit permanently was through intense counselling sessions of psychotherapy.

While methadone dealt with the physical effects of withdrawal, work was then needed to tackle the core issues of addiction, she said.

"You need to treat the addict and treat the effect of drug misuse on wider society," said Mrs Oliver.

"Ripple has made a great deal of progress and now has the credibility of getting people into treatment quickly."

She highlighted the difference between private treatment for those who could afford it and the services offered to those who could not.

"If you have money you can go into residential care where you will receive psychotherapeutic treatment."

But Mrs Oliver said: "In the community you will get harm-reduction prescribing and social care."

She added: "Over the years we have been operating we have done a great deal of work in terms of harm reduction and crime reduction. We are well on the way.

"We have now got to invest in psychotherapeutic care. Do we want people ticking over or do we want them getting better?

"What I want is hundreds of former addicts walking around Bradford saying that there is a solution."