EarthTimes.org
ZURICH: The liberalization of drug laws in Switzerland has seen a substantial fall in the number of heroin users, a study published in Lancet medical journal has indicated.
The country's policy on drugs, which includes providing alternative narcotics to highly potent drugs like heroin and needle exchange programs, has led to fewer users of the drugs as young people start to consider the substance a "loser drug,'' the study said.
The number of new heroin users in Zurich rose more than 10 times from 1975 to 1990 before falling 82 per cent by 2002, researchers at the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich said in the study. The government's liberal policy had come into force in 1991.
Two researchers, Carlos Nordt and Rudolf Stohler, wrote in the report, "The medicalization of opiate dependence changed the image of heroin use as a rebellious act to an illness that needs therapy. Heroin seems to have become a 'loser drug' with its attractiveness fading for young people.''
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Zurich city had gained notoriety for open drug scenes in the so-called "Needle Park'' and the abandoned Letten train station. The government had introduced in 1991 a supervised access for addicts to methadone or buprenorphine, drugs that mimic some of heroin's effects. It brought out mandatory health insurance that covers treatment costs and patients could choose any doctor they wanted. The government also tried to make heroin use safer by providing safe and hygienic places to inject the drug and exchanging used needles for new ones.
The editors of Lancet have urged the U.K. to follow the example of Zurich and evolve a new drug policy. While the country has introduced needle exchange programs, it does not subscribe to the idea of safe injecting houses, or "drug consumption rooms.''
The study's authors said new users in the state of Zurich increased from 80 in 1975 to 850 in 1990 before falling to 150 in 2002.
In an accompanying comment on the report, researchers from University of Bristol in the U.K., led by Matthew Hickman, said the results do not necessarily mean that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the government's policy and the decline in new heroin users. "Although there might be no evidence that a substantial increase in heroin injection followed the introduction of a policy of heroin prescribing, comparisons with other countries are necessarily speculative,'' Hickman and colleagues said.
The researchers looked at data from more than 7,250 addicts, who were treated with the drugs over 13 years. They obtained information about the first year of regular heroin use by these addicts and then discovered that every second person began their first substitution treatment within two years of beginning to use heroin regularly. However, the researchers also found that the population of problematic heroin users dropped by only four per cent a year and this, they explained, has been because of low cessation rate in Switzerland.
In 1996 there were 7,100 reported heroin addicts in Zurich; last year there were 6,200.
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I'm sure the good ole' USA will completely disregard and blow this off for some reason or another.
-------------------- "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" "Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword" - John Mayer Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln
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