The following letter to the editor of the Canberra Times was published
(Peter Watney, Letters, Aug 14):

Forced abstinence does not work

FOR SEVERAL decades our laws have required complete abstinence from
heroin. Use and abuse of the drug have steadily increased over that
period.

Users who become addicted to the drug start using it in spite of the
law, and become abstinent if they live long enough and if and when
they decide that they will suffer and survive the pains of withdrawal.
Until they do, we are stuck with them feeding their habit at the
expense of criminal damage, at the expense of imprisonment, or at the
expense of methadone or heroin maintenance.

Efforts at mandating abstinence (Colliss Parrett, Letters, August 8)
have been spectacularly unsuccessful.

Dr Gabriele Bammer has devised a scientific trial of one possible
method of keeping people alive without danger to themselves and others
until they make that choice.

When they do make that choice then rapid opioid detoxification might
be one of the modes open to them, but compulsory detoxification,
whether rapid or slow or assisted or solo, very, very seldom works.

PETER WATNEY
Holt