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50 years of methadone treatment

Fifty years ago, America was gripped by a heroin crisis. Addiction had risen rapidly after the second world war, and centred on New York City, where approximately half of the country’s heroin addicts lived. Desperate for a solution, Rockefeller University pitched the use of an alternative opioid, methadone, as a way of helping heroin users […]

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The Glasgow fix rooms: a shift in attitude towards addiction?

Glasgow City Joint Integration Board has approved a plan for ‘fix rooms’, which would, in principle, provide medical-grade heroin for drug users to inject in supervised hospital rooms. Glasgow has some of the worst rates of heroin addiction in Scotland, with around 5,500 injecting drug users, up to 500 of whom inject in public places. […]