Civing heroin addicts heroin is a more effective treatment than methadone, according to the results of the NAOMI trial published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The North American Opiate Medication Initiative found 67 per cent of 115 people prescribed heroin reduced illicit-drug use or other illegal activities compared with 47.7 per cent of 111 patients who were given methadone.
The study, conducted in Vancouver and Montreal, showed an 87.8 per cent rate of retention in addiction treatment for those taking heroin in a clinical setting over a 60 per cent retention rate for those assigned to receive methadone.
"For those that were not doing well on methadone there is another option for people suffering from chronic addiction and it's very much needed because there's been very little innovation," said Inner Change Foundation executive director Trish Walsh.
The next step, according to Walsh, is the multi-million dollar Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness (SALOME), which will analyze hydromorphone use, an oral substitute for injecting heroin, scheduled to start later this year.
"The pill format is much easier to provide this treatment as there remains stigma around the use of heroin," Walsh said.
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- Reporter
- Dharm Makwana currently serves as a web editor at The Province, British Columbia's best read daily newspaper. For more than four years he wrote on issues affecting the Lower Mainland for the province's third largest daily newspaper Vancouver 24 hours. Before arriving in Vancouver in January 2007, Dharm won the John Lott Scholarship for outstanding journalism at Centennial College. Since then Dharm has developed an interest in municipal and provincial politics, crime and policing and social issues including immigration, prostitution and trafficking. He is currently working on a series of stories involving Vancouver's sex workers.
Wisdom
I don't want to be that guy mumbling into his drink at a bar.
-Bill Murray
-Bill Murray