Swiss likely to approve prescription heroin

[DogPoundPup]

Source: Yahoo News

GENEVA – Dr. Daniele Zullino keeps glass bottles full of white powder in a safe in a locked room of his office.

Patients show up each day to receive their treatment in small doses handed through a small window.

Then they gather around a table to shoot up, part of a pioneering Swiss program to curb drug abuse by providing addicts a clean, safe place to take heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory.

The program has been criticized by the United States and the U.N. narcotics board, which said it would fuel drug abuse. But governments as far away as Australia are beginning or considering their own programs modeled on the system, which is credited with reducing crime and improving the health and daily lives of addicts.

Swiss voters are expected to make the system permanent Sunday in a referendum prompted by a challenge from conservatives.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081128/ap_on_re_eu/eu_switzerland_heroin_handouts

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Why would any sane society want to reduce crime and improve health?

That is fucking nutz.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. 60 Minutes did a piece on heroin prescribed in Britain for cancer patients.

Their pain was so debilitating that the heroin didn't make them addicts. Rather, it allowed them the dignity of sitting in a chair or lying down or walking without pain. It released them from the relentless insanity of their pain.

[Akoto]

3. Yep. I am prescribed an opiate for chronic pain, and it works just so!

If you're truly in pain, it overrides that feeling of euphoria, and you just get pain relief. I never have a psychological craving to take my pain medicine. My pain management doctor tends to define this as the difference between an addict and a dependent. Are they taking it for relief from pain, or for pleasure/relief from life?

I'll admit to some mixed feelings on the heroin program in Sweden. The folks receiving it are addicts, and some part of me wants to see them get help and try to break that addiction. On the other hand, getting the heroin this way ensures that they have moderated, safe doses which they don't have to do dangerous things to afford.

[glinda]

4. This does not address the core problem though

because the physical addiction and need is also promoted and sustained by the psychological and emotional issues. It is basically just keeping the person alive and doing nothing for the resolving the issue. A person's ability to live a normal functioning life where memory, conscience and perception is still dulled. I have no problem with opiates for pain and even dispersal of opiates as part of a program to wean the person off of it. Just to administer it. is to me, not the answer. In fact, addiction is all to treat pain. To forget.

[Akoto]

7. I can only say that ...

For some people such as myself, there is no cure (and often, no answer) for the pain. Opiates give a lot of folks their lives back, and as dependency goes, it's no different than having to take blood pressure or diabetes meds. Chronic pain is now regarded as its own disease, and is treated as such.

[Warren Stupidity]

8. Quite the opposite. Junkies are highly productive.

Unfortunately in a black market prohibition system that productivity is almost always directed at criminal endeavors. The swiss experiment, replicated elsewhere, also shows that by removing most of the cost and all of the illegality, addicts can lead normal productive lives. Perhaps not the most productive life they could possibly lead, although there really is no good way to test that, but within the bounds of normal.

[Pavulon]

5. One more reason Geneva

is a safe place. reasonable drug laws, good medical care.

[High Plains]

6. They will also vote on legalizing marijuana. Go Swiss!

The prescription heroin program has been going on for a decade. The researchers say it brings stability to the junkies' lives, allows them to hold jobs, improves their health, and reduces crime.

There was a North American Opiate Maintenance Initiative (NAOMI) pilot program that just ended in Vancouver and Montreal. While the US was supposed to be involved, too, that didn't happen.

We don't even have any safe injection sites here, but with Obama and the Democrats we should finally see an end to the ban on federa funding of needle exchanges.

We should follow the Swiss model.