Pubdate: Wed, 25 May 2005
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2005 The Vancouver Sun
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Maurice Bridge
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?136 (Methadone)

STUDY ON HEROIN ADDICTS SEEKS MORE RECRUITS

Not Enough People Applied To Receive The Street Drug By Prescription

VANCOUVER - Recruiters for Vancouver's ground-breaking free prescription 
heroin study have changed tactics to attract more subjects.

"We're more in the street," Jim Boothroyd, communications manager for the 
study, said Tuesday. "We're going out more and talking to people.

"We're talking to the service organizations that are closest to this very 
hard-to-reach population, so we're talking to the folks at Lifeskills 
Services, the folks at the Carnegie Centre, Vancouver Native Health, we're 
talking to the physicians who deal with these people."

Despite initial community concern the North American Opiate Medication 
Initiative (NAOMI), which is the first of its kind in North America, would 
attract heroin addicts to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the study has 
fallen behind schedule in finding the 157 subjects it needs.

The original recruitment strategy, borrowed from similar studies in 
Holland, was that potential subjects would telephone the NAOMI office and 
volunteer.

"We thought that we'd be inundated with telephone calls, and that we would 
just take telephone calls in three-hour windows twice a week, and we would 
enrol by that method roughly 28 people per month," Boothroyd said.

NAOMI began recruiting in February, and while it has had 300 calls in three 
months, only 21 people are in the program so far.

In late March, the recruiters changed tactics, and another person has been 
added to the recruitment team, bringing it to four.

Boothroyd said part of the difficulty in recruiting comes from the 
marginalization of potential subjects, who must be addicts who have so far 
not responded to any kind of treatment.

They have to be over 25, and hard-core users for five years who have used 
heroin every day for the past year, but have not recently used methadone, a 
drug used to treat heroin addiction.

They must not be on probation or facing criminal charges, and must live 
within a 1.6 kilometres of the project's Downtown Eastside location. They 
must also agree make their medical history available to researchers.

Some subjects will receive pharmaceutical-grade heroin in prescribed doses 
under a doctor's supervision while others will receive methadone.

The study hopes to determine whether heroin-assisted therapy is more 
effective at helping people suffering from chronic heroin addiction who 
have not benefited from other treatments.

At the end of the study, subjects will be taken off their dose of heroin 
and treated with detox, methadone and health services.

Dr. Martin Schechter of the University of B.C., the principal investigator 
in the study, says the delay in recruitment is "not a major problem".

"I think there's a myth that people thought we were going to fill up the 
study on day one," he said. "In fact, it was never our intention. We always 
wanted to recruit slowly and steadily over a period of nine months.

"It's probably going to take a little bit longer than that, but we're not 
really that concerned."

He said the experimental aspect of the study and the fact that it uses 
actual addicts makes it necessary to move slowly and carefully.

"This is a clinical trial, this is not like any other program," he said. 
"We are doing human experimentation, and therefore the rules and 
regulations governing NAOMI are of the highest standards, because it's 
medical research."
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MAP posted-by: Beth