Liberal drugs policy works
Switzerland - Providing heroin addicts methadone or buprenorphine as a treatment for their addiction has led to a decline in the number of new heroin users in Zurich, according to a paper by Carlos Nordt and Rudolf Stohler from the Psychiatric University Hospital, Zurich, published in The Lancet.
The country implemented various policies to try to reduce harm to dependent heroin users, including needle-exchange services, low-threshold methadone programmes, and heroin-assisted treatments. However, some critics believe those policies could lead to a growing number of new drug users and lengthen the period of heroin addiction.
However, following analysis of data from over 7,250 patients in Zurich who had received substitution treatments with methadone or buprenorphine over a 13-year period from 1991, the researchers estimated trends in the number of new heroin users and found that the incidence of heroin use had dropped from 850 new users in 1990 to 150 in 2002.
Conversely, the researchers noted that, in the UK, Italy, and Australia, heroin use has continued to rise, and the cessation rate has been low - therefore the overall number of heroin dependents, whether in treatment or not, only declined by 4% per year.
Because the Swiss supported the policy on opiate dependence, the image of heroin use changed from being a rebellious act to being viewed as an illness that needs therapy, Dr Nordt suggested. Finally, the perception of heroin is that it is a ‘loser’s drug’, so its attractiveness has faded for young people. ‘Nevertheless,’ he concluded, ‘whether the drug policy had a positive effect on the number of new heroin users or not, our data could not confirm an increase of heroin incidence as expected by the critics of the liberal Swiss drug policy.’
01.07.2006
