But it has engendered enough hope or curiosity for the project to serve as a model for other countries. In 1999, Swiss citizens voted by referendum to turn the experiment into a long-term project. The pink house in Thun is part of the result. David Vlahov, PhD, the director for the Center of Urban Epidemiology at the New York Academy of Medicine, helped found a study group of physicians and researchers from the US and Canada to explore whether such a program were viable in either of these countries. The North American Opiate Medication Initiative, a purely educational group of doctors and researchers from Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Yale, and other institutions, came together in 1998 to share scientific results and draft a research protocol.
Harm reduction means nothing.
No one is opposed to reducing harm. Advocates see heroin as dangerous but occasionally necessary, like chemotherapy. The ideology underlying prescription heroin is known in public health circles as harm reduction. A loose constellation of ideas including such measures as syringe exchange, drug courts, and even low-tar cigarettes harm reduction is driven by the pragmatic approach that people have always and will always use drugs, and that governments and health programs should minimize attendant harms rather than fight an immutable social fact. The key isn't whether people are using drugs or not, but whether they're having problems with use, according to Drucker, who is active in the movement to recast drug use from a criminal justice issue to a public health issue.