Heroin maintenance and attraction to treatment.

of prescribing injectable heroin and methadone to opiate-dependent drug users: associated health gains and harm reductions. Active heroin injectors' perceptions and use of methadone maintenance treatment: cynical performance or self-prescribed risk reduction? Substance It takes your heart: the image of methadone maintenance in the addict world and its effects on recruitment into treatment. Opiate users' views on methadone and other opiate prescription treatment in Canada: a qualitative focus group study. drug of choice to opiate dependent drug users: a comparison of clients receiving heroin with those receiving injectable methadone at a West London drug clinic. Prof essor Fischer and his colleagues 1 offer a useful and thoughtful overview of developments and plans for heroin-assisted treatment studies in a total of NINE countries. The practical problem from which all the trials start is that some part of the population of regular users of illicit heroin and other opiates does not come voluntarily into treatment either with prevailing forms of opiate maintenance or in various 'drug-free' treatment regimes, even when the thresholds for entry to these treatment modalities are lowered. As Fischer et al. note, in France the prevailing form of opiate maintenance is with bupre-norphine; elsewhere, it is with methadone. The proposition that heroin users should be in treatment rests on a variety of concerns and assumptions: a socio