Word: heroine
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...study, published in the October issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers recruited 115 cocaine-dependent people who were also addicted to heroin and enrolled in a methadone-treatment program, which made it easier for investigators to keep people in the study for a full 12 weeks. Half of the participants were given five injections of the vaccine over the course of the study, while the other half received a placebo...
...Among the researchers was Ambros Uchtenhagen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Zurich, who set up clinics in Switzerland where drug users injected heroin under doctor supervision and received counseling. "We found highly persistent improvement [among the patients]," says Uchtenhagen. Today, there are 23 clinics across the country that treat roughly 2,200 drug users, or about 6% of the nation's heroin addicts. The average stay is three years - a quick stint for users who average 15 years of heroin use. Less than 15% relapse into daily use. "In the beginning, without their daily chase...
...Britain has long permitted doctors to prescribe heroin for a small number of hard-to-treat patients, but in the 1970s and 1980s doctors became reluctant to prescribe doses high enough to actually work, fearing patients would sell them on the black market. "It was a lose-lose situation," says Strang. Then, in the early 1990s, researchers from Switzerland, which was witnessing a dizzying spike in heroin use, came knocking. "They saw what we were doing and said, 'We can do better,' " Strang says. (See pictures of cannabis culture...
...program, too, has its critics. "What about other addicts? Will we soon be giving cocaine to cocaine addicts? Alcohol to alcoholics?" asks Mary Brett, vice president of the nonprofit group Europe Against Drugs. "This perpetuates addicts' maintenance on the drug when the goal should always be abstinence." (Read "Swiss Heroin Program Is Put to a Vote...
...Despite some opposition, though, Britain faces fewer potential roadblocks in making the treatment program permanent than other countries that have experimented with it, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Canada. This is largely because Britain already has heroin on the books as a medication and, most crucially, because the program has strong political backing. The government has already said it would keep the clinics open provided the trial showed positive results. Paul Hayes, head of the National Treatment Agency, stressed in the Guardian newspaper this month that the clinics would only be available to a "very small proportion...