DOCTORS START WORK ON HEROIN TRIAL

The Australian Medical Association will lobby the Prime Minister, the
federal Attorney-General and the Health Minister in a bid to establish
a small-scale heroin trial in Australia.

It is likely the powerful doctors' group will also write to state
governments, the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Democrats
in a renewed push for a trial.

On Sunday, delegates at the AMA's national conference passed a motion
endorsing medically prescribed heroin trials to manage, and ultimately
treat, addiction to the drug.

Support for a heroin trial is technically not yet official AMA policy,
but it is expected to become so at the next AMA federal council
meeting, in August.

Although some doctors oppose heroin trials, the AMA's president, Dr
David Brand, said the motion endorsing a trial won by a comfortable
majority on Sunday.

A vice-president of AMA Victoria, Dr Allan Zimet, put the motion for a
heroin trial and said yesterday the harm-minimisation philosophy
needed to be fully extended.

But yesterday the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, repeated his opposition to
trials. A spokeswoman for Mr Howard told The Age: ``The Prime Minister
remains firmly opposed to a heroin trial. He is very much of the opinion
that it sends out the wrong message to the community.''

The weekend vote was not the first time the AMA had publicly aired
support for a heroin trial. Before the ACT heroin trial was blocked by
the Federal Government in 1997 the AMA had given the trial its
in-principle support.

Dr Brand said the AMA firmly believed a properly conducted experiment
should be conducted involving a small number of long-term addicts,
perhaps 40 or 50. It should probably run for three or four years, he
said. ``It would give us information about whether the supply of
heroin on prescription to long-term addicts was useful in their
management,'' he said.

The chairwoman of the AMA's ethics and public health committee, Dr
Sandra Hacker, said the doctors' group would not operate the trial but
support specialist agencies that did.

``The AMA is concerned about the extraordinary growing number of
addicts and deaths. And I think the other thing that's happening is
that the community views are beginning to shift, there's a recognition
that law-enforcement agencies are not actually winning against
importers and dealers, so we have to look after the end users as
effectively as we can,'' she said.

Dr Nick Crofts, from the Centre for Harm Reduction at the Macfarlane
Burnet Centre for Medical Research, said he was delighted by the AMA's
support. ``The proposition to trial the prescription of heroin for
heroin-dependent people is nothing more and nothing less than a proper
scientific experiment in broadening our range of treatments for people
with an intractable problem,'' he said.