Word: treatment
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...less than perfect treatment, but for entrenched addicts, it gives them the first steps toward getting their life together," says John Strang, a researcher with the National Addiction Centre and King's Health Partners in London, which led the partially state-funded project. "Some make a virtually complete recovery, but others, we get them from a bad place to a less bad place...
...Sarah, one of the participants, says she had tried countless treatment programs in the past, but nothing had rid her of her 20-year heroin habit. "I was pretty chaotic," she says. "Most of my time was taken up by either looking for money or taking drugs." But by going to the clinic every day to inject heroin, she received help finding housing and battling her depression and had time to become a mentor for inmates being released from jail. Within the first year of the trial, Sarah had reduced her injections from twice a day to once...
...course, the treatment was initially met with skepticism from the Swiss public. But last year, 68% of people backed a referendum to keep the clinics permanently funded by the state, obviously convinced that the positive results showed the treatment works. The British 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...
...Sarah hopes the program's future is decided quickly so that those in her treatment group can hang on to their newfound stability. "That's the one downside about this treatment - the insecurity, knowing that it's still a trial," she says...