Last year alone, King County recorded 110 deaths from unintentional heroin overdoses, and early data project equal or higher numbers for 2000. This follows an all-time high of 140 unintentional heroin deaths locally during 1998. To address the issue, we began work last year on a heroin initiative to redesign local approaches to treatment access, criminal sentencing, education of health professionals and development of effective interventions. This task force has been exploring and examining many aspects of heroin and other injection drug use. Agreement is emerging that we must increase availability of and access to treatment interventions for heroin addiction, particularly methadone treatment.
Treatment is known to be highly effective.
Experts from the National Institutes of Health concluded as much in 1997 after reviewing available scientific information. They identified methadone substitution treatment in particular as effective at generating prolonged periods of abstinence from heroin use by recovering addicts. Addiction treatment also reduces crime, largely because recovering addicts no longer need to support their expensive drug habit through criminal activity. It is much cheaper to treat heroin addicts than to jail them. Obviously, this is a big savings with an outcome of greater benefit to the addict and to the community.