Not a addiction specialist, but I’d assume that a low maintenance dose of heroin or methadone dosed to fulfill a physiologic need rather than to provide a high could be administered under medically supervised conditions. Supervised long term dose tapering would help wean folks off of opioid dependence in the long run.
The big problem with this sort of concept is the idea that you’d have trained medical professionals “shooting up” drug users. Oh Noes! There are a lot of things in accepted medical practice that go with a “lesser evil” to ensure improved long term survival rates or quality of life (think chemo…). If not for the aforementioned “puritanical moralizing” I’d bet that this sort of treatment plan could be funded for study and would eventually get put into place.
