H E R O I N
recruitment poster on a wall inside of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (vandu) site in 2005. (Photo by the author.)
naomi
Although I have written about Canadian drug prohibition and its manifestations for decades, I began to focus more closely on heroin regulation in 2011. My interest was spurred on after participating in a Canadian drug reform meeting in January 2011, organized by what was to become the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. A number of long-time activists were there, including Dave Murray. At a break, Dave told me about a new peer-led group that had just started meeting weekly at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (vandu) in the Downtown Eastside (dtes) of Vancouver, BC. Dave was facilitating these meetings with the support of vandu. At that time, the independent group called themselves the naomi Patients Association (npa). Dave invited me to meet with the members of npa. After meeting with the npa, they invited me to collaborate with them to tell their own story as the first people in North America to receive heroin-assisted treatment. Thus began a nine-year collaboration. Every member of npa had been a research participant in Canada’s first heroin-assisted treatment (hat) clinical trial, the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (naomi), which recruited 251 research subjects from February 2005 to March 2007 in Vancouver and Montreal. The npa members and other naomi participants were the only people in North America to receive heroin-assisted treatment (hat) at that time. However, even though the trial results were positive, once the clinical trial ended, a permanent heroin-assisted treatment program was not established. At the end of the trial, naomi participants had the option to either return to conventional treatments that had previously failed them or to buy heroin from the il-
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