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Article: METHADONE BEST TO TREAT HORRORS OF HEROIN USE.(Editorial)
- Article from:
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- Article date:
- January 22, 1998
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the Dialog Corporation by Gale Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The United States pioneered the use of the synthetic opiate methadone to treat heroin addiction in the 1960s and 1970s, but now lags behind much of Europe and Australia in making methadone accessible and effective.
Methadone is the best available treatment in terms of reducing illicit heroin use and associated crime, disease and death.
In the early 1990s the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine stated that of all forms of drug treatment, ``methadone maintenance has been the most rigorously studied modality and has yielded the most incontrovertibly positive results . . . Consumption of all illicit drugs, especially heroin, declines. Crime ...