Heroin Maintenance Trial to Begin in Canada

Buoyed by research showing that giving heroin to addicts in a controlled setting can reduce crime and improve health, Canadian researchers are set to launch a trial heroin-maintenance project in Montreal and Vancouver, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported June 2.

The three-year Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness (SALOME) trial will offer heroin in pill and injectable form to a group of 200 heroin addicts.

The project is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a part of Health Canada, and has the tacit approval of Canada's Conservative government. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government has worked to shut down Vancouver's Insite supervised-injection site for opiate users, but the SALOME project takes the harm-reduction concept a step further by actually providing heroin to addicts.

Researchers led by Michael Krausz of the University of British Columbia hope to determine whether medically prescribed heroin can be used safely and effectively to treat addiction, and whether users will accept the drug in pill form. Results of heroin maintenance will be compared to a group of subjects who will instead receive the opioid hydromorphone, aka Dilaudid.

The treatment group will consist of heroin addicts who have not responded to other treatment interventions.

SALOME is a followup to the North American Opiate Medication Initiative, also a project of Health Canada.