VANCOUVER, B.C. — Dr. Martin Schechter believes an experiment giving a number of Vancouver drug users heroin is a necessary one that will benefit the community along with users.

"These 160 or so people, they will not have to engage in criminal activity because they will know that their allotment of heroin is going to be provided by a doctor," said Schechter, a University of B.C. researcher who is the principal investigator for the Vancouver portion of the Canada-wide experiment.

It involves giving a select group of heroin users their drug to see if it helps stabilize them and improve their health.

"The whole idea of the study is that if they don't have to go stand on the street and sell sex or break into cars or burglarize your house, there may be a window of opportunity where you could actually get them to break that cycle and get them out of that spiral," Schechter said.

The clinical trial hit the headlines last week when a letter went out to residents near the 600-block East Hastings advising them a development permit had been requested for a site on that block in order to run a two-year experiment in prescribing heroin.

The North American Opiate Injection Trial, or NAOMI, as it is known, is supposed to begin in March, along with similar trials in Toronto and Montreal.

While there was little opposition from local groups to the idea of the trial, many said they didn't like the location - a block from a school, a half block from a day care, and next to a new housing complex built by the Union Gospel Mission specifically for people who want to live in a drug- and alcohol-free environment.

Schechter admitted that the original experiment, which first started being discussed in 1997, was supposed to include American test sites as well, which is why it was called the North American trial.

"But obviously, the environment in the United States is not particularly amenable to this kind of study," said Schechter, speaking from New York. "I think there was hope among our American colleagues that some cities would be able to participate. But as time went on, it became more and more clear that they wouldn't be able to."

The experiment, which will involve 470 people in the three Canadian cities, will see about half of the users getting the heroin substitute, methadone, which is already commonly used for people trying to quit, and the other half getting prescription heroin.

In Vancouver, 88 people will get heroin and 70 will get methadone.

Those chosen will have to be long-term residents of the Downtown Eastside who have been addicted for a number of years and have tried methadone programs more than once and failed at them.

Those who stay with the trial will receive about $100 over the course of the 15 months they are in the program to pay them for filling out lengthy evaluations at certain points in the trial.

Both groups will get extensive counselling and support in trying to quit altogether.

The experiment is modelled after studies in Europe, which showed that users given heroin had a better success rate of stabilizing their lives, improving their health, staying housed, and keeping out of jail than those who were using methadone or trying to quit altogether.

Schechter said he finds it hard to understand the concern people have about children or others having to walk past the building.

"The children who walk to those schools pass injection drug users every day."

He said that, at least with an experiment like this, there will be 160 fewer people on the streets injecting.

"The people who are going to be in this study are there right now. They are chronic heroin addicts and they are in the Downtown Eastside injecting as we speak, injecting dirty heroin with unsafe needles and they do it in the alleys and the hotel rooms and apartments and the cars in this neighbourhood. And we are going to 160 of those folks and bring them into treatment with the best available therapies."

Schechter said the trial has already received approvals from ethics review boards at the three participating universities, along with the body that regulates the prescription of medications in experiments.

The trial is now waiting for approval, just as Vancouver's supervised-injection site had to, from Health Canada, which needs to grant it an exemption from the Narcotics Act.

He said everyone has been reluctant to talk publicly about the trial until now because people thought it was inappropriate to talk about a trial that hadn't been approved yet.

The trial has been granted $8.1 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, although that is a little short of the amount needed.

Schechter said the price of the heroin will be higher than originally budgeted because the researchers were originally going to obtain a particular formulation of the laboratory-produced drug and discovered they couldn't do that, so they had to go to a different formulation and manufacturer, which was more expensive.