Source: Reuter 12 June 1997 U.N. helps to test Vietnamest addiction treatment By Evelyn Leopold UNITED NATIONS, June 12 (Reuter) The United Nations is stepping up testing of an herbal medicine that Vietnamese doctors believe can cure heroin, opium or cocaine addiction in anywhere from three days to about a month. Roy Morey, the Washington director of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), told a news conference on Thursday the medicine, known as Heantos and containing 13 traditional herbs, had been already been tested on 3,000 Vietnamese addicts. It is taken in liquid doses for three to five days and then in tablet form for another month. UNDP announced last month in Hanoi that it was contributing $500,000 to the project. The trials in Vietnam have shown a high degree of success, with only about a 30 percent recidivism rate, and side effects have been minimal. But Morey said full testing would ``require another two years or so.'' He said Vietnamese scientists had appealed to UNDP for funds and technical advice, aiming to conduct further trials ``in an internationally recognised way'' and see whether the treatment could be tested elsewhere in the world. Followup studies are being conducted in both Vietnam and the United States by the Vietnamese government and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. A group of Vietnamese experts will visit Washington late this month to meet their counterparts at Johns Hopkins and probably U.S. congressmen. Dr. Lutz Armand Bahr of UNDP, who spoke about the drug on Tuesday in Copenhagen, said the herbal cocktail had been developed by Vietnamese specialist Dr. Trang Khuong Dan, who had deliberately become a heroin addict after his brother died of a drug overdose. Morey said applications would be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in Washington for clinical tests that Johns Hopkins may want to be carry out in the United States. Vietnam's long land border and coastline make the country an easy transit route for drug traffickers. The government has reduced domestic cultivation of opium poppies, the source of heroin, to between 10 and 15 tons a year, compared with 2,000 tons or more in Burma. Estimates of the cost of drug abuse in the United States range from $70 billion to $80 billion a year for treatment, crime associated with drug addiction and the cost of AIDS, which can be transmitted by drug users sharing needles.