PILOT PROGRAM HERE MAY HELP BATTLE AGAINST HEROIN USE

The hand-scrawled messages on the flip-chart in the lobby of the Sheraton
Hotel were heart-stopping in their simplicity.

"For Alan, my daddy."

"Greg - brother, father, son and friend - may you soar like a diamond
through the heavens."

"Jen 'Little Man', we miss your rebel spirit."

The ad-hoc altar to people who had died of heroin overdoses looked
incongruous in the elegant lobby, but it was a poignant reminder to the 400
conference-goers of the purpose of their meeting.

Seattle, which has one of the highest rates of heroin use in the country,
yesterday hosted a first-ever international conference on preventing deaths
from heroin overdoses.

The conference, sponsored in part by the University of Washington's Alcohol
and Drug Abuse Institute, the Seattle Police Department, Public Health -
Seattle and King County, and the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy institute
in San Francisco, drew together active drug users, police, treatment
providers, researchers and regulators to brainstorm new solutions to an
age-old problem.

Inside the conference rooms, seminar leaders discussed a range of options
from educating addicts about "safer" practices, such as not shooting up
alone and using needle exchanges, to new medications to treat heroin
addiction.

Among the most innovative strategies is one being tried for the first time
in Seattle.

Beginning later this month, a hand-selected group of recovering addicts
will be able to get methadone through their doctor's offices, instead of
having to make daily pilgrimages to methadone clinics.

The program, which is being financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
will enroll 30 patients and employ seven doctors.

If successful, the pilot program could help ease the strain on methadone
treatment centers, said Ron Jackson, executive director of the Evergreen
Treatment Services.

Methadone treatment continues to have detractors in the drug treatment
field, who argue that it substitutes one drug for another.

People in the treatment field who advocate strategies for "harm reduction"
from drug use, even if it doesn't result in total abstinence, have been
accused of "enabling" addicts to keep using, said Alan Marlatt, director of
the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington.

"All I can say to that is if there's something to enable the person to stay
alive, then we should be doing it."