Despite fighting in the courts to shut down Insite, Canada's only safe injection site, Canada's conservative federal government is providing funding for a heroin prescription pilot program in Vancouver and Montreal. The program will begin providing heroin to some 200 hard-core users later this year.

Known as SALOME (the Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness), the program builds on a similar multi-year program in Vancouver that ended last summer. That program, NAOMI (the North American Opiate Medication Initiative), was funded with $8 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research with the approval of Health Canada, but the government of Prime Minister Steven Harper has refused to publicly acknowledge research findings that participants' physical and mental health improved and that they committed fewer crimes.

Still, the Institutes of Health Research are quietly throwing in $1 million for SALOME. Josee Bellemare, press secretary to Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, told the Toronto Globe & Mail: "Our government recognizes that injection drug users need assistance. That's why we are investing in prevention and treatment, to help people recover from their drug addictions."

The three-year trial will offer heroin in both pill and injectable forms, and will also offer hydromorphone to see if it could be used as a substitute. The trial will seek to assess whether prescription heroin is a safe and effective treatment and whether users will accept the drug in pill form. Researchers are currently recruiting hard-core users who have not responded to conventional treatments and say they expect to have clinics operating in the two cities by this fall.

Canada joins Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland as countries where heroin prescription programs are in place either permanently or on a trial basis. The German parliament voted last week to join the club, too.