Swiss heroin trial

She frequently goes back to England to visit her mother for holidays and takes oral morphine instead. The randomized controlled trials included 1, participants in 17 places, including new and existing opioid substitution clinics and prisons across Switzerland. The European Monitoring Centre review found some promising trends. HAT program participants use less street heroin and illegal drugs than in the control groups treated with oral methadone. The annual cost per HAT patient ranges from 12, euros a year in Switzerland to 20, euros in the Netherlands.

These are much higher than the annual cost of oral methadone treatment, which is 3, euros per patient in Germany and 1, a person in the Netherlands. The increased cost is due to the high staffing need at heroin treatment facilities. Most HAT programs require multiple staff members present at all times. And most programs do not allow the same take-home dosages allowed with other opioid substitution programs. So clinics must be open days a year for extended morning and evening hours. However, Switzerland changed the law in to allow two days of oral heroin take-home doses for stabilized patients.

The European Monitoring Centre determined that HAT programs result in significant savings to society, particularly in the reduction of costs from criminal justice proceedings and incarceration of drug users. Beck, the medical director of the heroin-assisted treatment program in Zurich, said that when he goes to conferences in North America, his U. There will always be moral objection to these kinds of programs, Beck said. There are people in Switzerland who hear all the evidence and data for HAT but will not support it.

Rita Annoni Manghi, medical director of the the HAT program in Geneva, said she, her colleagues and patients met with community members at coffee shops to explain what they were doing. Neighbors around the HAT facility were scared of the program and thought it would lead to more drug use, she said. This work is very important to change the minds of people.

Republish This Story. Taylor Knopf writes about mental health, including addiction and harm reduction. Knopf has a bachelor's degree in sociology with a More by Taylor Knopf. The self reported use of non-prescribed heroin fell signifianctly, but other drug use was minimally affected.

There were limited reports of problems in the local neighbourhood, despite the high frequency of daily attendance.

Heroin diversion was not a major problem, although some trial participants were expelled for attempting to remove heroin from the clinic or to smuggle cocaine into the clinic. The Swiss trials have encouraged proposals for similar trials in other countries, including Australia, 5 and, more recently, Denmark, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands.

Any country that contemplates a trial of heroin prescription will need to address several problems that arose in the Swiss trials. Secondly, in the Swiss trials heroin was prescribed as part of a comprehensive social and psychological intervention.

In the absence of any comparison treatment it was impossible to disentangle the pharmacological effects of heroin from the effects of providing treatment in well resourced clinics with highly motivated staff. An assessment of this issue requires an appropriate comparison treatment. Thirdly, the unique social and political context of the Swiss trials makes it uncertain how to generalise their findings to other countries.

Switzerland is a wealthy society that has a comprehensive healthcare system that includes a well developed drug treatment system whose staff have substantial experience with opioid substitution treatment. Given this limited role, the controversy surrounding heroin prescription in Switzerland and elsewhere has been out of all proportion to its likely role as a treatment option. J Subst Abuse Treatment. Hall W, Darke S. Trends in opiate overdose deaths in Australia Sydney: University of New South Wales; NDARC technical report.

Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Tyrell I. The US prohibition experiment: myth, history and implications. Farrell M, Strang J. Confusion between the drug legalisation and drug prescribing debate. Aust Drug Alcohol Rev. Full text links Read article at publisher's site DOI : Manifold implications of forgotten hyperglycemia in clinical opiate dependence. Heroin maintenance for chronic heroin-dependent individuals. Innovations in agonist maintenance treatment of opioid-dependent patients.

Heroin maintenance treatment for chronic heroin-dependent individuals: a Cochrane systematic review of effectiveness.

Similar Articles To arrive at the top five similar articles we use a word-weighted algorithm to compare words from the Title and Abstract of each citation. The Swiss heroin trials. Further studies of heroin treatment are needed. Understanding Swiss drug policy change and the introduction of heroin maintenance treatment.

Narcotics prescription in Switzerland. Heroin maintenance for heroin addicts: issues and evidence. Joining Europe PMC. Tools Tools overview. ORCID article claiming. Journal list. Grant finder. External links service. Annotations submission service. Developers Developer resources. API case studies. SOAP web service. Editor—Farrell and Hall seem to have misunderstood the importance of the Swiss trials of heroin on prescription for addicts.

These include dealers and pushers and those who succeed in obtaining funds through crime. Methadone clinics attract newer rather than hard core addicts.