CIHR funds groundbreaking heroin clinical trial

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is providing $8.1 million for North America’s first clinical trial of prescribed heroin for chronic addicts. The two-year North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI) will try to determine ways to improve the health of addicts and reintegrate them back into society. It will enrol 470 participants in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal with half receiving pharmaceutical-grade heroin and the other half receiving methadone. The heroin group will be shifted to methadone or another treatment program after 12 months. Previous studies show that 10-20% of the heroin-addicted population do not benefit from methadone maintenance therapy and account for a disproportionate amount of drug-related problems related to public health, crime and public order. The NAOMI research team is led by Dr Martin Schechter, Univ of British Columbia faculty of medicine and will involve that institution as well as the Univ of Toronto and the Univ of Montreal. CIHR gave NAOMI the go-ahead after the proposal received a 4.3 out of 5 rating and ranked fourth out of 72 reviewed experiments. It ranked in the top sixth percentile of about 2000 grants reviewed by CIHR in the same competition….