Principle Hope

There is some good news after all. The decrease of death tolls among drug addicts is good news, and the news may be even better if the prospecting data still to be confirmed were proven to be true. In this case, as in many others, success has many fathers. The treatment of drug addicts is a hard and toilful task often accompanied by backstrokes and misunderstandings. Even today only few manage to free themselves from their addiction after having undergone an endless therapy. Nevertheless, professionals have now learnt from their past experiences.

Drug treatment is expensive. It is met by success only on intensive and one-to-one basis. For example, the city of Frankfurt, Germany, spends 10 Millions DM in drug policy each year. This is a lot of money. Actually, though, this huge amount of money is a good investment. Drug addiction after all is more expensive, especially if one considers the criminal activities it entails. In the present economic crisis one would be tempted to take into consideration short-term benefits, in this case it would be a mistake, for it would put the outcome of the initiative at stake, which presently appears to bear encouraging results. Drug therapy is most successful if pragmatic in character and free of ideological prejudice. While politicians are still debating over the use of methadone as a substitute for heroin, fieldworkers have already made their decision, even if they don't consider it to be the ideal cure: they are aware that this treatment works. On the other hand, they fear that in times of economic crisis, it may

be considered as the sole - and cheap - treatment for drug addiction. It would be a highly dangerous choice.

The debate continues. Long-term physically disabled addicts, have shown strong resistance not only to methadone but also to other therapies. For this reason, city administrations like Frankfurt's and Hamburg's are taking into consideration an experimental therapy in alternative to the ones traditionally pursued, namely the controlled distribution of heroin to those patients who have shown the above mentioned resistance. Of course such initiatives have immediately met by an uproar by the prohibitionists, who label these experiments as initiative encouraging drug addiction. The Head of the Federal Drug Enforcement Bureau, Lintner (CSU, Christian Socialist), maintains that such experiments will "be inefficient and irresponsible in the long run." But is it really so? Who is pursuing the right strategy? Those who recognize the existence of drug addicts who cannot be cured through traditional therapies? Or those who give the issue no consideration at all? The local officials in Hamburg and Frankfurt who are presen

tly applying for permission to perform the experimental therapy, have been successful in their drug policy, more than their critics have ever been. Nowhere else in Germany have the deaths by drug addiction decreased so much as in the two cities. This item alone shows where the efficiency and responsibility in drug policy lie.