A series of opiate clinics in five Danish city councils are scheduled to have already opened and begun providing treatment services (including, in some cases, free heroin) to local addicts.
Unfortunately, one of the clinics, in the town of Odesene, remains shuttered. The problem doesn’t have anything to do with politics or law and order — instead, the challenge has been finding enough affordable and potent heroin to satisfy the needs of the patient population.
The Danish government has provided 70 million Danish kroner (more than $13 million) in funding for the pilot project to provide heroin to addicts in Copenhagen, Odense, Esbjerg, and Glostrup. But The National Board of Health, the agency responsible for sourcing the heroin, is having difficulty finding a pharmaceutical manufacturer that can supply as much heroin as the agency needs at a price it can pay.
The Danish newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende has reported that the government has launched a fact-finding team to travel abroad to find out more about the heroin manufacturing process, in the hopes of finding a way to supply and store the heroin it needs at a lower cost. The Danish government did not reveal which countries the fact-finding team will visit.