Benefits of heroin treatment for drug users

BMJ: Heroin assisted treatment can achieve better outcomes at a lower cost for some patients. Drug users who do not benefit from conventional treatments for heroin addiction should be able to access the drug through the health system, urges a Canadian expert in The BMJ today. Standard treatments for heroin drug addiction include detoxification, abstinence programmes and methadone maintenance, but there is a subgroup of patients for whom these do not work. As doctors can provide no effective treatments for these patients, many will remain “outside the healthcare system” and there is “overwhelming” evidence that they will relapse into using illicit heroin and “suffer immeasurably” while costing society a “fortune,” explains Martin T Schechter, Professor, School of Population and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Mount Sinai Research into Reducing Heroin Injection and HIV Infection

Mount Sinai. US: The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded Don C. Des Jarlais, PhD, Director of Research, Baron Edmond de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a 2015 Avant-Garde Award. Dr. Des Jarlais will receive a grant of $500,000 per year for five years to lead a HIV prevention study in two cities contending with growing heroin use: New York City and Tallinn, Estonia, in Eastern Europe.