What we currently lack are medicinal approaches to preventing relapse other than substitution therapy.
Strong campaigns around clean needles and opioid substitution therapy (O.S.T).
Lewis said Iranian authorities have considerably improved the situation regarding IDU through oral substitution therapy and needle-syringe programmes.
At such clinics, doctors encourage immediate abstinence from drug use, rather than the gradual process that methadone substitution therapy entails.
He alone quit, but after he had contracted H.I.V. "If there is another treatment besides substitution therapy, there's no problem," he said.
Though not every addict would benefit from methadone substitution therapy, more than 60percentt of Russian users would, Dr. Krupitsky said.
Treatment with the common opioid drugs methadone and buprenorphine is banned in Russia, ruling out substitution therapy programmes to wean addicts off drugs.
Three drug users have sued Russia in the European Court of Human Rights, arguing the ban on substitution therapy is discriminatory.
Similarly, Dr. Piot said he wished he could have persuaded Russia to permit methadone substitution therapy for injecting drug users, who are fueling a growing AIDS epidemic.
Through most of west Africa, substitution therapy to wean users off opiates using prescribed drugs like methadone is banned.
Niamh Eastwood, the executive director of Release, criticised what she described as an ideologically driven "abstinence" agenda that had led to an increasing number of people forced to reduce opioid substitution therapy prescriptions or who had had them removed altogether.
