WHEN TAXPAYERS SUBSIDISE JUNKIES

IT'S TWILIGHT on a winter's day in Bern, Switzerland, and a stream of drug
addicts hurries from the chill into a nondescript building. Seated at small
Formica tables, they swab an arm or leg with antiseptic, slide the needle
into a vein and inject a preloaded syringe of pure heroin-Their narcotic
hunger fed, they shuffle out into the darkness. There are no drug dealers
lurking in the background; the addicts pay only $13 for each fix, about
one-tenth of the price on the streets. They can get up to three fixes a
day: morning, noon and night. The heroin is supplied by the Swiss government.

Welcome to the latest chapter in Switzerland's war on drugs. During a
three-year experiment, special clinics were set up, dispensing heroin,
morphine and methadone, a heroin substitute, to more than 1000 addicts in
15 cities.

The "Medical Prescription of Narcotics Programme" (PROVE) hopes to wean
hard-core users off drugs and, in the process, decrease the spread of HIV,
and cut crime. Advocates claim it is a success, and tout it for other
countries - such as Australia - grappling with drug problems.

But before the rest of us leap, we should take a closer look -we are likely
get a great deal more than we bargained for.

Few go clean.

For Roland Seitz, stick-thin and ravaged by his habit, a programme
promising heroin and a chance to get dean sounded like "paradise on earth."
His journey t0 addiction had begun in 1981, when he was 20 years old. After
losing his job and flat, he lived on the streets, doing whatever it took to
get drugs.

After the PROVE programme began, Seitz injected his first legal heroin at
Zurich social services' "Lifeline" clinic in 1995. 'At the start, it was
great," he says. He was surprised and delighted - to discover that the
maximum limit set by the clinic' was so high that soon he had increased his
intake to more than double the amount he had ever used on the streets.

But no real efforts were made to rescue him from his habit. He spoke to a
doctor only when he felt like it. Social Services found him a room in a
Salvation Army hostel. Occasionally, he'd had a day job in the city.
"During 18 months, I did a total of maybe six weeks' work," he recalls.
When he wanted to inject cocaine - not approved by PROVE - he returned to
the streets to buy it.

Thanks to medical care and generous welfare payments, Seitz's health
improved. But his addiction deepened. "They'd given up on me," he
concluded. "They gave me heroin to keep me quiet. I finally realised that
the heroin project was as bad as the drug scene."

Seitz quit the programme to fol1ow the harder road of detoxification and
total abstinence. Within six months he was drug free.

According to PROVE's official guidelines, a principal aim for participating
addicts was "wherever possible, dropping the habit." In fact, four years
after the project started, few participating addicts are drug free. Of
about 800 people in the experiment, only 83 (just over ten per cent)
decided to give up heroin and switch to "abstinence therapy," leaving the
rest still addicted. Roland Seitz feels he made it off drugs not because of
the programme, but despite it.

In July 1997, using data provided by heroin clinics and addicts,
independent University of Zurich researchers published the official
findings. Most addicts' health and lifestyle was judged to have improved.
The number working more than doubled (from 14 per cent to 32 per cent);
crime and court convictions fell dramatically. The programme was pronounced
a success.

However, the research report that cites the programme's success has been
attacked for its unscientific approach. Addicts were often unsupervised,
many of them were multi-users who continued buying illegal drugs on the
streets, and others maintain they weren't even hard-core heroin addicts
when they started participating in the programme.

Claudio Ponte smoked heroin three or four times a month... he hoped the
novel treatment approach would help him. It didn't

Construction worker Claudio Ponte was one of them. On oral methadone for 17
years, Ponte smoked heroin three or four times a month. Nonetheless, he
signed on at the clinic in Olten, his home town in Northern Switzerland,
hoping the novel treatment approach would help him kick his habit. It
didn't. Once he joined the programme he started injecting heroin every day.

"Some addicts have given up on their lives. For them it was agreeable," he
recalls. "I wanted to get out. But as long as you're behind the wall of
heroin nobody can reach you."

Finally, Ponte did get out. But not thanks to prescription heroin.
Sentenced to four years in prison for dealing heroin and cocaine, he
accepted a judge's offer of bail on condition that he undergo
detoxification and residential abstinence therapy. Since Christmas 1996 he
has stayed off drugs. The solidly built 36-year-old now plans to work in
drug-use prevention.

What began as a brief trial aimed at drug-free lives has been transformed
into long-term heroin maintenance - and is now part of a longer effort to
'normalise' illegal drug usage.

At Bern's heroin clinic I asked doctors if I could meet with a patient
considered a success of the PROVE programme. They introduced me to Miriam*,
39, a former nurse. Long ago, she had been a university student majoring in
music and German with high hopes for the future. She'd used heroin and
cocaine for eight years and was living in the streets before enrolling in
the programme. Now she had a restaurant job and a flat, and had cut down
her daily heroin dose.

But as we talked, she twisted nervously in her chair. It was past the time
of her usual evening fix. Like almost every other junkie in Switzerland's
giveaway-heroin programme, Miriam is still an addict. Though the heroin
experiment ended officially on December 31, 1996, "treatment" continues for
the people still in the programme. "It would be unethical to stop giving
them heroin now," says Dr Christoph Burki of Koda-1, the Bern heroin
clinic. And in fact, what began as a brief trial aimed at drug-free lives
has been transformed into long-term heroin maintenance -and is now part of
a longer effort to "normalise" illegal drug usage in Switzerland,

Last year, the Swiss Parliament approved a proposal to make heroin
available to all hard-core addicts who fail in other treatment programmes.
For the remainder of the country's drug users, proposed changes in the
narcotics law may decriminalise all possession and use of all illegal
substances. "Our experts tell us it doesn't make sense to distinguish
between hard and soft drugs," says Dr Thomas Zeltner, director of the Swiss
Federal Office of Public Health.

Jean-Paul Vuilleumier, a campaigner for the anti-narcotics movement Youth
Without Drugs, and an opponent of PROVE, worries that "other countries will
now follow our bad example." They are. In the Netherlands, Italy, Germany
and Denmark, Swiss-style programmes have begun or are being considered. In
November 1997 the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament
recommended that EU member states decriminalise illegal drugs. However, the
move was blocked by the Parliament's General Assembly.

In Australia, a council of federal, state and territory health and law
ministers, held in July 1997, backed proposals for a heroin-on-prescription
pilot study. Initially to supply 40 Canberra addicts with free heroin for
six months, the programme could eventually recruit 1000 heroin users in
three Australian cities over two years. Before it could begin, however,
Prime Minister John Howard vetoed the proposal in response to community
concerns.

The debate is not over yet. Last November both the Council of Capital City
Lord Mayors and the cross-party Australian Parliamentary Group for Drug Law
Reform voted to continue lobbying for new approaches to drug regulation,
including prescription trials. "There's a strong case for considering
seriously any new approach that has a reasonable chance of working," argues
Alex Wodak, president of the Australian Drug Reform Foundation. "If our aim
is to reduce deaths, disease, crime and corruption, why not use as a model
Switzerland, where real progress is being made?"

But decriminalisation experiments have already been tried. Sweden began
giving away injectable drugs in 1965. They stopped two years later, because
"neither drug use nor criminality decreased," says Torgny Peterson,
Stockholm director of European Cities Against Drugs. "It was a complete
disaster," he adds. Sweden now has the toughest drug laws in Europe.

In England Dr John Marks handed out heroin to almost 200 patients for years
with the aim of reducing addiction and drug related crime. Ironically, soon
after PROVE was launched Dr Marks had his funding removed. Officials in
England halted routine heroin handouts and transferred patients to other,
cheaper treatment programmes. "There was no evidence that heroin
prescription did anyone any more good than methadone," explains Dr Paula
Grey, the district's public health director.

Recipe For Disaster.

The number of addicts in Switzerland has not decreased. But of more than
1500 places at drug-therapy hostels, whose purpose is to get addicts off
drugs, some already remain untilled. "Switzerland has good therapeutic
facilities, but government policies on drugs are undermining them," warns
pharmacist and psychologist Dr Franziska Hailer. "The state is sending the
wrong signal to young people."

From Vienna, the International Narcotics Control Board watches the Swiss
situation with concern but is powerless to intervene. "The Swiss are
playing with fire, and we don't know where it will lead," cautioned
secretary Herbert Schape. "Just imagine what would happen if countries like
Pakistan, with hundreds of thousands of drug addicts, say to us 'What's
good for the Swiss must be good for us too.' It's a recipe for disaster."

* Name has been changed to protect privacy.