U.N. helps to test Vietnamest addiction treatment

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS, June 12 (Reuter) The United Nations is stepping up testing
of an herbal medicine that Vietnamese doctors believe can cure heroin, opium
or cocaine addiction in anywhere from three days to about a month.

Roy Morey, the Washington director of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP),
told a news conference on Thursday the medicine, known as Heantos and
containing 13 traditional herbs, had been already been tested on 3,000
Vietnamese addicts.

It is taken in liquid doses for three to five days and then in tablet form
for another month. UNDP announced last month in Hanoi that it was
contributing $500,000 to the project.

The trials in Vietnam have shown a high degree of success, with only about a
30 percent recidivism rate, and side effects have been minimal. But Morey
said full testing would ``require another two years or so.''

He said Vietnamese scientists had appealed to UNDP for funds and technical
advice, aiming to conduct further trials ``in an internationally recognised
way'' and see whether the treatment could be tested elsewhere in the world.

Followup studies are being conducted in both Vietnam and the United States
by the Vietnamese government and the Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine in Baltimore.

A group of Vietnamese experts will visit Washington late this month to meet
their counterparts at Johns Hopkins and probably U.S. congressmen.

Dr. Lutz Armand Bahr of UNDP, who spoke about the drug on Tuesday in
Copenhagen, said the herbal cocktail had been developed by Vietnamese
specialist Dr. Trang Khuong Dan, who had deliberately become a heroin addict
after his brother died of a drug overdose.

Morey said applications would be submitted to the Food and Drug
Administration in Washington for clinical tests that Johns Hopkins may want
to be carry out in the United States.

Vietnam's long land border and coastline make the country an easy transit
route for drug traffickers. The government has reduced domestic cultivation
of opium poppies, the source of heroin, to between 10 and 15 tons a year,
compared with 2,000 tons or more in Burma.

Estimates of the cost of drug abuse in the United States range from $70
billion to $80 billion a year for treatment, crime associated with drug
addiction and the cost of AIDS, which can be transmitted by drug users
sharing needles.