Medicine: Those crazy Dutch heroin addicts

I'm as opened minded as any likely future psychiatrist to creative and sensitive drug addiction therapies. But somehow prescribing heroin to heroin addicts doesn't seem like the best idea:

There are strong reasons to support the practice of prescribing heroin to drug misusers, researchers claim.

A University of Amsterdam team says the treatment is cost-effective, even though it is expensive.

The British Medical Journal study found the cost to health services was offset by savings linked to crime reduction.

Supervised medical prescription of heroin - a class A drug in the UK - is controversial. UK experts said a range of treatments should be available.

Previous research has shown supervised medial prescription of heroin improves the physical and mental health, and ability to function normally in society, of users who cannot be successfully treated using just methadone - a synthetic narcotic used to treat heroin addiction.

Part of recovering from drug abuse implies that an incentive to quit is in place. In most cases, the incentive is something that resembles a normal life, a life that doesn't hurt your loved ones or keep you in a life of crime where you're liable to get blown away. Something about giving heroin to heroin addicts seems to negate that incentive, and heroin isn't exactly a healthy thing to be injecting into your body. If somehow the threshold for using this sort of therapy were exceptional, i.e. the addicted person couldn't just say, "screw the methadone, I want the real stuff so I don't have to scrounge," and have that wish met at a whim, then maybe there's a place for this approach.

Or maybe we should just ship them all over to the Netherlands.