The Atlantic

The Strongest Evidence Yet for a Highly Controversial Addiction Treatment

When other approaches fail, the most effective way to fight a heroin addiction can be heroin itself.
Source: Darryl Dyck / AP

As overdose deaths break records year-after-year in the U.S., a group of researchers has looked around the world for new treatment options to try and landed on a counterintuitive method. A new comprehensive report concludes that it’s time for Americans to earnestly pilot and study “heroin-assisted treatment,” a controversial approach that involves patients who are severely addicted to the drug injecting medical-grade heroin in a supervised setting.

Motivated by the urgency of the country’s overdose crisis that killed more than 70,000 people in 2017, driven mainly by potent , researchers at the Corporation, a California-based think tank, spent a, another harm-reduction intervention popular across Canada and Europe.

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