Edinburgh University researches followed hundreds of people living with addiction to heroin for nearly 30 years. What did they learn?
Methadone treatment:
- reduced the frequency of drug use
- helped people lead more stable lives
- reduced the risk of death by 13% each year
Why am I not surprised? Because I’ve seen this with my own eyes. And these results are consistent with previous research.
Part of what interests me about this study is that researchers followed participants in the research study for decades. That is very useful.
The study will be published in the British Medical Journal on July 17, 2010. I will be very interested to read the details of what they found, and will likely comment further in a future post.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is an interesting study. I am surprised that the decrease in deaths was only 13 percent per year. Not that 13 percent is something to scoff at but I thought it would be higher.
We’ll have to wait for the study to be released for the details, but I’m waiting to hear more about how they came up with that 13% figure.
Although heroin addiction can certainly lead to death, many people survive active heroin addiction for decades.
When the percentage of people who die each year is low, it seems like it would take a lot of effect to improve survival by a large percentage. For example, smoking can be fatal, but in any given year most smokers will survive the year just like most non-smokers will survive the year. So in that particular year, quitting smoking will not drastically improve your survival rate for that year in comparison to your smoking friends.
We know that people who are addicted to heroin may experience years of incarceration, homelessness, violence, loss of child custody, HIV, and Hepatitis C, but still not actually die. So the goal needs to be more than just keeping people alive.
Fortunately, methadone improves lives along with saving lives. People living with opiate dependence who are in methadone treatment are less likely to experience things like incarceration, HIV, or violence even as they live longer.
Again, I’d say what this study shows is very much in the eye of the beholder.
I’ve read it, and to me it shows what most people who have been on methadone know, that addicts continue to shoot drugs while on methadone. The study pointed out that being on methadone did not change the length of time addicts continue to inject drugs.
And to say that an addict taking an addictive long-acting narcotic like methadone has “reduced the frequency of drug use” is not really saying much, in my opinion.
Mortality improved for people on methadone, but this is only as compared to active addicts using heroin. How does the mortality rate compare to those who, like me, gave up drugs entirely? Guess that wasn’t part of the “study”.
I don’t believe these things mostly because they have an obvious agenda, and also because any study that relies on interviews with active addicts for it’s data is unreliable in my opinion. When I was on drugs I would have told the researcher, Dr. or whomever, whatever I thought would result in me getting an increase.
I think people are misunderstanding what the 13% means. I do not believe it means 13% will die, or 13% will survive, but that whatever the death rate for addicts not on methadone (why don’t they state what that is??), 13% fewer will die with it the first year, and 13% fewer than that the second year, etc. Without the non-methadone death rate given, there is no way to know that the actual death or survival rates are. This is so typical of the vagueness in many reports like this. It would so easy to be clear, if they made half an effort.