VANCOUVER, Canada, Feb. 7 (AFP) - Despite harsh US protests, a Canadian government clinic will doll out free heroin to hard-core addicts after it opens on Wednesday, a stone's throw from the US border.
The clinic in this western coastal city will test, for the first in North America, whether prescribing heroin can cut overdoses, HIV and hepatitis infections, and reduce hard-core junkies' dependence on crime to obtain the drug.
Several European countries have run similar studies, but the clinic's proximity, 37 kilometres (23 miles) to the United States, has made Canada's trial especially controversial.
Officials at the US White House anti-drug office have called it unethical and an "inhumane medical experiment."
Others, however, hope the clinic will help desperate addicts free themselves from lives of crime.
"Getting heroin prescribed as a trial is a huge victory," said Ann Livingston, director of an activist organization of drug users in Vancouver.
"My surprise is that we got this through after (US authorities) clearly didn't want it."
"It's a great idea," said Dianne Tobin, an addict for 30 years who supports a 300 Canadian (240 USD) dollar a day heroin habit with prostitution, shoplifting and trafficking drugs.
Tobin, 54, hopes to be one of the 158 addicts chosen to participate in the North American Opiate Medications Initiatives, or NAOMI, trial.
The trial is aimed at hard-core addicts aged at least 25, who have used heroin for at least five years. Participants must have tried, and failed, to break their habit using methadone at least twice.
A secondary goal of the study is to find out if it helps addicts wean themselves off heroin.
Lead researcher Dr. Martin Schechter, an HIV/AIDS scientist at the University of British Columbia, said 88 participants will receive pharmaceutical-grade heroin three times every day. The other 70 will take oral methadone. All will receive medical care and counselling.
Similar trials since the mid-1990s in Europe have worked, and a program has continued in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Germany and Spain are now running trials, and another is planned in Britain, said Schechter.
Squalid Downtown Eastside Vancouver is home to nearly 5,000 heroin addicts. Its clinc is one of three planned in Canada. Clinics in Montreal and Toronto are expected to open within the year. Mostly because of US politics, the scientific team abandoned its earlier plan to open three US clinics.
The trial has been approved by Canadian ethics committees and is receiving 8.1 million (6.48 MUSD) in government funding.
Schechter, a leading HIV/AIDS researcher, said it would be unethical not to try to treat heroin addicts for whom other methods have failed.
"They are breaking into cars, being hospitalized, having overdoses, getting Hepatitis C and HIV, theyre in the sex trade and theyre in rough shape," he said.
Even as the trials begin, activists are lobbying for heroin prescriptions to continue if the one-year study proves helpful.
The researchers, however, said their job is to provide scientific evidence, and after the trial is over it will be up to Canadian politicians to decide how to use it.
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