The First International Conference On Heroin Maintenance: Commentator Panel, Alan Fleischman, Moderator

After this panel we have three concurrent focus sessions, at approximately 3:30, we will break from here and go both to the second and forth floor. If you look at your packets, you will see that on the second floor, in room 20, moderated by David Marsh and with the help of Toni Berthel, Robert Haemming and William Shanahan, there will be a discussion of clinical and treatment issues.

In room 21, moderated by Ambros Uchtenhagen and Wim van den Brink, who we've heard from this morning, and including a premiere panel from across the world, we will talk about the research and evaluation aspects of these questions.

On the fourth floor Earnest Drucker will moderate a session on legal and policy strategies and he too will have a premiere panel with him.

I hope that you will stay for those sessions, and we will reconvene here in the President's Gallery on the first floor for a reception for all participants at five o'clock. I want to remind you that there is an evaluation in your packet, we greatly appreciate your thoughts in evaluating this program so that we might continue such programs and enhance them in the future. There is also, for the physicians, continuing medical education credit available, and those forms will be available when you turn in the evaluations at the end of the day.

Now, let's move to our commentator panel. I did want everyone in the audience to know that we invited three speakers who were unable to attend and comment; the Honorable Barry McCaffrey, the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Dr. Alan Leshner, from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and Pino Arlecchi, the Executive Director of the United Nations Drug Control Program. All three were unable to attend and unable to send speakers in their stead.

But we do have a superb panel this afternoon, and I will introduce all of our speakers and let them each have a few minutes at the podium, and then we will ask for your comments and questions. We will start with David Lewis, who is Director of the Center for Addiction Studies at Brown University and Professor of Medicine and Community Health.

Since 1983, Dr. Lewis has been Director of the National Office of the Association for Medical Education and Research in Substance Abuse. He is also Director of the newly designated WHO Collaborating Center at Brown University and Project Director of the Physician Leadership on National Drug Policy.

After Dr. Lewis, we will have Dr. Martin Schechter. Dr. Schechter is a Professor in the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology and Chair of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of British Columbia. He is the Director of Epidemiologic Research at the British Columbia Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and principal investigator of the Vancouver Injection Drug User Study.

He is also past President of the Canadian Association for HIV Research and is currently National Director of the Canadian HIV Trials Network, a national network of investigators and research facilities aimed at conducting trials of HIV therapies and vaccines.

We have added to our panel a family member in response to Ethan Nadelmann's comment this morning about to not having sufficient numbers of what we call consumers of the services that we provide. We do have Bronwyn Barnard. Bronwyn has traveled from Australia to join us with a firmly held belief that together, physicians, families and politicians can make an enormous difference. Her brother died in 1996 from an overdose of heroin and we will hear the story of her family's response to his illness.

And fourth on the panel we have Dr. Alexander Wodak. He is the Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service Program at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia. He is also President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation. In the early 1990's, he recommended the development of a heroin trial to a Parliamentary inquiry into illicit drug use, and his recommendations were adopted by that committee and he became a member of the subsequent Heroin Trial Advisory Committee, and was public advocate for the trial. So it is a pleasure to introduce this panel, and we will begin with Dr. Lewis.