The idea is this: If some people are going to use heroin no matter what, it’s better to give them a safe source of the stuff and a safe place to inject it, rather than letting them pick it up on the street — laced with who knows what — and possibly overdose without medical supervision. Patients can not only avoid death by overdose but otherwise go about their lives without stealing or committing other crimes to obtain heroin. [...]
Crosstown represents an international move toward providing a full spectrum of care for people who are addicted to drugs. It isn’t a first-line defense against opioid addiction, and it’s not going to solve the crisis by itself. But for a fraction of opioid users suffering from addiction (maybe about 10 to 15 percent), other treatments won’t produce good results, almost certainly leading users to relapse — and possibly overdose and die. [...]
Heroin-assisted treatment has been used in the UK since 1926. But it’s gained more international attention in the past couple of decades thanks to Switzerland’s embrace of it in the 1990s. Twenty-one clinics there (and a prison program) now deploy the treatment. Due to the opioid epidemic, the approach is now getting more attention in the US — MacDonald even testified in front of Congress last year. [...]
In 2015, the latest year with data, drug overdoses killed more than 52,000 people in the US, and more than 33,000 of those deaths were linked to opioids. The total drug overdoses dwarf car crashes (more than 38,000 deaths in 2015), gun deaths (more than 36,000 that year), and even HIV/AIDS at its peak (more than 43,000 in 1995).
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