ABSTRACT
For years, prescribing injectable heroin to opiate addicts in the name of treatment has been unique to the UK. Indeed, until the mid-1990s, the prescribing of any injectable agonist as part of the treatment for opiate addiction occurred only in the UK, apart from a small scheme with injectable methadone in the Netherlands (Derks 1990), and three patients who represented the rump of 27 heroin addicts who were started on injectable methadone in 1977 in Queensland, Australia (Adrian Reynolds, personal communication, 1993). However, through the late 1990s and early years of the new century, interest in this area has expanded greatly (Bammer et al. 1999; Fischer et al. 2002). New experimental clinics of supervised injectable heroin prescribing were introduced initially in Switzerland (Perneger et al. 1998; Rehm et al. 2001; Guttinger et al. 2003) and subsequently in the Netherlands (van den Brink et al. 2003), prompting consideration of similar new services in other countries also. In addition, there are also a small number of patients on injectable methadone in the east of Switzerland (Stohler et al. 1999; Stoermer et al. 2003), and a couple of entrenched dependent opiate addicts being treated with injectable methadone in New Zealand (Lee Nixon, personal communication, 2002).
