Mike Levin: “last week, the fight against heroin addiction took a major leap forward after a decade of struggle. On October 8, 2002…”

“last week, the fight against heroin addiction took a major leap forward after a decade of struggle. On October 8, 2002, the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, announced the approval of a new anti-addiction drug, buprenorphine/naloxone, which, followed with the directives of a new law I authored along with Senators Hatch and Biden, makes a dramatic change in the way America fights heroin addiction. This new anti-addiction drug, developed under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, CRADA, between the National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA, and a private pharmaceutical company, has been the subject of extensive successful research and clinical trials in the United States. The new law, the Drug Addition Treatment Act of 2000, permits, for the first time, such anti-addiction medications to be dispensed in the private office of qualified physicians, rather than in a centralized clinic. That change can have a revolutionary reduction in the number of addicts, the crimes some of them commit, and the heroin related deaths which have occurred. This newly approved anti-addiction medication has already been in use in France, where significant success has been achieved in getting patients off of heroin, reducing drug-related crime and reducing heroin-related deaths. For example, user crime in France and arrests are down by 57 percent and there has been an 80 percent decline in deaths by heroin overdose.”