Welcome to The Irish Needle Exchange Forum
The INEF exists to actively develop, support, and sustain a network of high quality, comprehensive needle exchange and other harm reduction services across Ireland.
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Methadone treatment (podcast)
Posted on August 6th, 2010 No commentsShould the Government cut back on its £300m a year use of methadone to treat drug addicts? Linda Pressly reports on calls to get more users clean of drugs.
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Methadone works. Stop the interfering
Posted on July 26th, 2010 No commentsThe medical profession has reached a consensus. The front page of last week’s BMJ reads “Drug users and HIV: Treat don’t punish”. Within its pages is a an analysis piece entitled “Why Russia must legalise methadone” and a report on the Vienna declaration, which calls for the incorporation of scientific evidence into drug policy.
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Methadone Versus Buprenorphine With Contingency Management or Performance Feedback for Cocaine and Opioid Dependence
Posted on July 25th, 2010 No commentsPhysicians may prescribe buprenorphine for opioid agonist maintenance treatment outside of narcotic treatment programs, but treatment guidelines for patients with co-occurring cocaine and opioid dependence are not available.
This study compares effects of buprenorphine and methadone and evaluates the efficacy of combining contingency management with maintenance treatment for patients with co-occurring cocaine and opioid dependence.
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Methadone isn’t a one-size-fits-all treatment
Posted on July 21st, 2010 No commentsRaising the issue of who and what should be funded by the NHS is an easy way to provoke heated debate in any social situation. Sex-change operations, providing ongoing treatment for smokers who continue to smoke and treatment of drug users suffering from hepatitis C are all topics that give rise to almost as many divided and strongly defended opinions as complimentary therapies.
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Limits to methadone prescription proposed by drugs agency
Posted on July 18th, 2010 No commentsNational Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse wants open-ended heroin substitute use ended
Strict limits on how long drug addicts are allowed to stay on heroin substitute methadone have been proposed by the government body responsible for treatment strategy, in what will be seen as a watershed in UK drugs policy.
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CityWide Submission to the Methadone Treatment Protocol Review
Posted on July 15th, 2010 No commentsCityWide is clear that methadone has been a very useful element of drug treatment in Ireland. But we are equally clear that it is not a treatment in itself. Methadone should be used as part of an overall care plan for drug users; this intervention should include all other elements required for progression in recovery.
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New evidence prescription opioid use is rising
Posted on July 13th, 2010 No commentsPrescription opioids overtook methadone in 2007 to become the third most commonly injected drug, behind heroin and methamphetamine, a survey of 10,000 participants in the Australian Needle and Syringe Program reveals.
While methadone injection rates remained stable at around 9%, injecting rates of opioids rose from 9% in 2005 to 16% in 2009.
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Heroin users facing firmer action to cut drug addiction
Posted on July 11th, 2010 No comments“Methadone prescriptions for heroin addicts would be cut and the National Treatment Agency that runs the programme scrapped under plans from the Tories favourite think-tank,” reports Rosemary Bennett, social affairs correspondent of The Times newspaper.
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Abstinence: from rhetoric to reality
Posted on July 11th, 2010 No commentsThe National Treatment Agency (NTA) published documents last week relating to their board meeting of the 6th July. Reading the three-page business plan for 2010/11 we discover that time-limiting methadone prescribing could very well become a reality in the next twelve months
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Methadone saves lives, study finds
Posted on July 9th, 2010 No commentsMethadone treatment improves long-term survival of drug users and reduces mortality, a study has shown.
Research carried out by the universities of Bristol, Cambridge and Edinburgh found that opiate substitution treatment reduced the frequency of drug use. The treatment also led to a drop in the risk of death by 13 per cent each year.
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