BERGEN, Norway — The pale, zombielike addicts staggering through concrete underpasses make an unlikely scene in wealthy Norway's picturesque second city.
As a gateway to the fjords that zigzag the oil-rich nation's long coastline, Bergen is the last stop on a global drug route that gives it one of the worst heroin problems in Europe.
Now with a change in local government here and in the capital, Oslo, there is an appetite to use radical policies to curb the alarming number of Norwegians who die of heroin overdoses each year. Alongside traditional replacement therapies, such as methadone, the new left-wing local leaders want to use a medical form of injectable heroin to treat the most at-risk users.
The official goal is to wean them off the drug entirely, but even the most ardent supporters admit the most achievable target is to bring them within a safer environment, while helping to tackle the crime associated with heavy drug use.
“We can't go on criminalizing our drug users. We need the trust between us and the health professionals,” said Kim Arnetvedt, an addict and member of the Association for a Humane Drug Policy, a campaign group.
Norway has the worst heroin mortality rate in Western Europe with 70 drug deaths per million inhabitants in 2013, according to the European Union's drugs watchdog, the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drugs Addiction.
In the continent as a whole, Norway trails only Estonia, with 127 deaths per million. The average is 16.
Like most of Bergen's estimated 1,100 regular users, Arnetvedt spends much of his time near the city-run Straxhuset needle exchange center between the housing projects and the industrialized western edge of the city where addicts can get clean needles, medical help and a hot meal. He reluctantly dips in and out of medical rehabilitation programs run out of centers like this, but is highly suspicious of a health system that he says is too close to the police and makes “every day of addiction miserable.”
He is treated with methadone and anti-depressants, but says he can't imagine ever shaking his addiction to heroin.
Some are skeptical. Anti-drug campaigner Mina Gerhardsen says free heroin therapy would put too much strain on many of the vulnerable users it is intended to reach.
“They won't be able to use this because you need to show up at the same place and time several times a day,” she said. “Many of these people are not capable of that.”
Gerhardsen also said the publicly funded medical heroin programs would be too expensive. The cost of the treatment can reach $22,000 per year, compared with an upper level of $3,800 per year for methadone, according to the EU drugs watchdog.
