The NYT headline says it all and I for one can't believe my eyes: Study Backs Heroin to Treat Addiction. What's next? Cigarettes cure cigarette addiction? A shot of whiskey followed by a PBR cures alcoholism? The Canadian study appears to have been more than "politically motivated" and seems little to do with anything actually resembling treatment.

According to the NYT study, small doses of heroin prove more beneficial to curing heroin than doses of methadone. The Canadian study appeared in the New England Journal of medicine and involved the use of diacetylmorphine, which is the active ingredient in heroin. The study's participants were given daily injections of diacytylomorphine and roughly 2/3 of them "significantly curbed their illicit activities" as opposed to those on methadone, who had a success rate of about 1/2.

Don't get too excited about these results, however. The danger is that when you are taking heroin, you are taking heroin. Of the 113 addicts taking heroin, there were ten overdoses and six seizures. For some bizarre reason, the University of British Columbia researchers are still recommending this treatment plan as a viable option. I am not a statician by any stretch of the imagination, but I fail to understand how a "treatment option" involving "overdoses" should really be considered a viable option.

To me, the study seems more concerned with curtaliing the "illicit behaviors" of the drug-users than any thought to the addicts as people with serious problems. This could be due to Vancouver's problem with drug-addicts resulting from the province's closure of the mental hospitals. According to the NYT:

"In an editorial with the article, Virginia Berridge of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded, “The rise and fall of methods of treatment in this controversial area owe their rationale to evidence, but they also often owe more to the politics of the situation.”

I can understand the political necessity of clearing up the streets, but the rationale of encouraging a treatment option with such a high overdose rate appears at best "politically motivated" and at worst, sick and inhumane. Interestingly enough the Canadian professor commenting on the study happened to be from the "School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia."

Hmmmm, sounds more like population control to my uneducated ears.

The main difference to me between this and a clean needle program is that this is "prescription grade heroin" and therefore legally sanctioned and the dose is supposedly lower. I don't know if the "prescription" is more expensive than the other. Additionally, although the results were more promising than the methadone control group, I somehow suspect that the methadone treatment would be much safer in comparison.