A9

Greg Joyce
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

VANCOUVER - Advocates of drug reform say they will release results from a trial drug program that provided prescription heroin to addicts at a news conference Friday, in defiance of efforts to silence the study in the midst of the federal election campaign.

The results from the North America Opiate Medication Initiative were initially scheduled to be released last month in Montreal but were put on hold due to the federal election, says a spokesman for a Vancouver-based advocacy group, Pivot Legal Society.

The federally funded clinical trial started three years ago with researchers at the University of British Columbia and the Universite de Montreal, eventually recruiting 251 drug addicts in Vancouver and Montreal who had previously tried - and failed - to overcome their addictions.

About half of those patients were provided injection drugs, primarily heroin, while the rest were put on methadone for comparison.

The goal was to see how a regular and safe supply of heroin could stabilize the lives of addicts, and how such a program could free people from the shackles of their addiction and leave them better prepared to seek help.

The study was funded by an $8.1 million research grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

David Eby of Pivot said the results were released in Switzerland in April.

"That's a good question," said Eby, when asked why they were not released here at the same time. He said the researchers are suppressing the results.

Groups critical of the fact the results were not released in Canada said they had obtained the findings and would make them public on Friday.

Eby said he did not know where the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users obtained the results. But they will "raise the questions about why the official paper has not been released yet in Canada," he said. Eby said it was his understanding that the results were to be released in Canada on Sept. 17 but that was postponed after the election was announced 10 days earlier.

"I'm sure the researchers want to release these results because it was a three-year study and cost $8 million to do. It's going to be released eventually," Eby said before the trial findings were released.

The results are highly anticipated as they come on the heels of a B.C. court ruling earlier this year that protects Vancouver's sanctioned supervised injection site on the grounds that it provides a constitutionally protected health-care service for addicts.

Martin Schechter, the lead researcher of the NAOMI trial, lauded the B.C. Supreme Court decision at the time.

Schechter, who was not scheduled to attend the news conference Friday and was not immediately available to comment on allegations the study was suppressed, said in June that the early results of the NAOMI trial had been promising.

"There was considerable improvement that you could see with the naked eye, a considerable number did (stop using drugs)," he said.

"Instead of these folks spending 24 hours a day in a crime cycle worrying about how to get their next black-market fix . . . they start thinking about their lives, what they might do with themselves - they begin to think about different ways of living."

The clinical trial wrapped up at the end of June.