Should Heroin be Prescribed to Addicts

Should Heroin be Prescribed to Addicts

Medical treatment of the heroin addicted people is a critical element of the drug addiction treatment and elimination. Even though there are multiple ways and approaches towards the heroine addiction treatment process, still there is a debate about effectiveness as well as pitfalls of every of them. One of the approaches towards treatment of the heroine addicted people is a maintenance treatment with heroin. According to the information provided in the article, there is evidence in the literature that maintenance treatment with heroin can be applied to the heroin addicted people only under certain conditions. In particular, health care professional from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and University of Victoria show that trials in Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany, have found that maintenance treatment with heroin is feasible as well as effective for those drug addicts that are resistant to common treatment. Moreover, unlike methadone maintenance treatment, heroin maintenance treatment is cost effective. Furthermore, studies in Sweden have shown that in the heroin maintenance programs, mortality among the patients is lower compared to the mortality of patients in other maintenance programs.

On the other hand, a lot of health care specialists in different countries find that heroin maintenance treatment may be dangerous and have a number of pitfalls. In particular, the most commonly cited disadvantage of the application of heroin in medical purposes is safety of the patient along with safety of the general public.

Therefore, discussion of the heroin application in the maintenance programs for heroin addicts is not conclusive. Overall, there is no supportive evidence that heroin can not be used with medical purposes for those heroin addicted patients that are resistant to other treatment. However, it is obvious that this approach of heroin prescription to people that are addicted to heroin is only focused on treatment of the misuse effect as it does not provide treatment of the addiction at large.

There are a lot of research studies that are focused on revealing various peculiarities and patterns among the drug addicts that are treated with heroin and other medicines. According to the conclusive findings of several studies in this area, it is identified that in the appropriate medical services settings application of heroin can not only stabilize continued drug use addiction through the specially prescribed route, but also provides longer abstinent periods. For example, according to a medical study in Scotland, around 30% of the heroin addicted patients that were receiving heroin maintenance treatment were abstinent from drug use for almost 90 days unlike only 3% of patients who have been receiving methadone maintenance.

Therefore, taking into account considerable number of drug addicted people that are addicted to heavy drugs like heroin, it should be noted that a lot of them are staying out of the health care system reducing their chances of getting rid from the addiction. Those drug addicts that enter the health care system have various degrees of addiction. Depending on the latter, different approaches in the medical treatment are undertaken to help patients become healthy. All of the patients are expecting health care services system to become free from the addiction. It is found that some methods of heroin addiction treatment are more effective compared to others. Recently, there has been a wide discussion of the application of heroin in the treatment of drug addiction. Even though some health care professionals find it ineffective in treatment the addiction, but there are more proved arguments in favour of this treatment approach.

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