Norway's government is to start providing free heroin to up to 400 hardened addicts as it pushes forward with its drug policy reforms."We want to help those addicted who are difficult to reach, those who are not part of LAR (drug-assisted rehabilitation) and who are difficult to treat," he told the newspaper. "Addicts should be met with health care and respect, not with punishment and condemnation," Hoie said in March when he appointed a new high-level committee to draw up the details of the new policy. "We are now moving away from what might be described as a moralistic approach in the previous thinking," he told the Verdens Gang newspaper at the time. "We fully recognize that some are not motivated to become drug-free. This group will now get a much better offer than before."
According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Norway has one of the highest fatal overdose rates in Europe, with 80 per million people in 2015, putting it below only Estonia and neighbouring Sweden.
But this is already an improvment on the year 2001, when the country's overdose rate was close to 140 per million, almost double the rate in Estonia, then still the country with the second highest rate.
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