Norway Considers Medical Heroin Programs To Curb Heroin Mortality Rate

With a change in local government in Norway and in the capital, Oslo, there is an increasing desire to use drastic measures to control the “alarming” number of citizens who succumb to heroin overdoses each year, the Associated Press reported.

According to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drugs Addiction, the EU drugs supervisory body, Norway has the worst heroin mortality rate in Western Europe with 70 drug deaths per million inhabitants in 2013. Speaking of the whole continent, Norway is second only to Estonia, with 127 deaths per million, the average being 16.

In addition to the traditional replacement therapies, such as methadone, the new leaders want to use a medical form of injectable heroin to treat the most at-risk addicts, the AP reported. The aim is of course to get them off the drug completely, but the most feasible target is bringing them within a safer environment, while tackling the crimes linked with heavy drug use.

"We can't go on criminalizing our drug users. We need the trust between us and the health professionals," Kim Arnetvedt, an addict and member of the Association for a Humane Drug Policy, a campaign group, told Associated Press.

Ola Joesendal, deputy director of Bergen's Haukeland Hospital, said over 90 percent of the city's heroin addicts receive methadone treatment. "But for a very small amount of addicted people it is not possible to establish contact through the (methadone) maintenance program," AP quoted Joesendal. "If we have the opportunity to reach them through heroin, then they can be reached."

However, some people are skeptical about the new measure. Anti-drug campaigner Mina Gerhardsen opines that free heroin therapy would put too much strain on several vulnerable users it is intended to reach.

“They won’t be able to use this because you need to show up at the same place and time several times a day,” she told AP. “Many of these people are not capable of that.”

Moreover, the publicly-funded medical heroin programs would be too expensive, Gerhardsen added. The EU drugs watchdog estimates that the cost of the treatment can total nearly $22,000 per year, as compared to $3,800 per year for methadone.