 Hej, jag heter Janne Wallin och är heroinist som nu går i ett metadonprogram här i Stockholm. Jag är nog en user och jag har en liv. I the evening I work as a projectionist at a cinema in town. When I'm a methadone I'm a drug user. The difference is that I'm not, I get my drugs the easy way. And I don't have to sort of do criminal acts in order to get the drug. I had a car accident in 1984, a rather severe car accident. I was stuck in the car with the engine up to my stomach and my face out through the window. I was in pain when I woke up with the intensive care and severe pain. Then I got the morphine for the first time as a pain killer. I was quite depressed and when I got the morphine it was like ultra was just disappeared. It was a very nice feeling, all the excitement disappeared, everything disappeared. It was a kind of a positive meeting and I think that has been in the back of my head ever since. Then later on in life and I had another trauma, more of a kind of a severe depression and shit like that. Now I'm with suicidal things and stuff like that, I really didn't want to live. Then this came up in the back of my head, maybe I should try out the morphine again. I did and I sort of made it through. When the addiction got such a hold on me that I started to do things, which is normally not in my nature to do, I stole from my kids to get money. I stole from my family, I stole my wife's wedding ring, took it to a pawn shop. I was so terrified of going to Turkey, completely terrified of it. I started up with heroin in 1991 and ended up in jail for three years and so on. When I went to the social services they said we can't help you. You're not down the drain enough, you have to do heroin for another four years and then you can come back and then we can help you. And then when I got method on 1998 I saw how the doctors treated persons that had, was severely sick of hepatitis C and HIV. Because they relapsed and then they took the method on away and throw them back on the street. Even if the doctor knew that you're gonna die in a five month period. They didn't care. I got to wait about six months before I came into treatment. Bad case you can die long before you're able to enter. I think substitution should be expanded even more, even though it has changed. It's still restrictive and I have met people in methadone who have not been able to get it here in Sweden so they will go to Copenhagen. In Stockholm it's easier to get into the program compared to other places like for instance Gothenburg you have to wait one, two years to get into treatment. Even though it's decided that you should have it. What I mainly criticize in the Swedish method on problem is the control, the extreme control. There's always this urine tests and if you're positive you will be punished. You will not get your take on doses. And at some clinics they do strip searches. You have to drop your trousers and maybe even your underwear and they will look over you for injection marks. And if you have kind of a little wound they will clean it and look so it is an injection mark. Even if it isn't they can claim that it is. They treat you like a little child or that you're potentially dangerous or that you don't know what's best for you. When you're in drug addict in Sweden you're automatically discharged from normal behavior so to speak. You're always kind of stigmatized in some kind of way. Often by people's attitudes and that's especially in treatment. Intervenser drug users are of course vulnerable for blood born viruses because they have the most accessible route to get the virus by sharing needles, syringes and other paraphernalia like the filters, the spoons, the cookers, everything. In 1968 there was a government decision that they should try to make it hard to get a hold of needle and syringes. So they made a policy that stated that you have to have needle and syringes on a recipe or prescribed. This was to prevent the epidemic of intravenous drug use. And this was in 1968 and in 1979 they had a failure of intravenous drug use around 12,000 and now we're up to the double. So I don't know if that policy was successful. As far as hepatitis C goes it's kind of a hidden disease. I got it back in 2001 I think it was. I hadn't heard about it before. I didn't really know what it was. I didn't know the difference between A, B and C and I didn't know that it could infect so easily. All the information came to me when it was too late. We recently did a prevalence study in Stockholm where we tested 300 intravenous drug users and the prevalence of hepatitis C was 89%. Internationally that's quite a high figure. One reason is that we don't have needle syringes programs but also it's a lack of knowledge among the users. When it comes to HIV my fear is that the lack of a needle syringe program would render in an epidemic of HIV among intravenous drug users which it actually did just a couple of years ago where you saw an increase of HIV among the intravenous drug users in Stockholm but not in the south of Sweden where we actually have two needle syringe programs. After many years a law has been passed saying that we could have needle exchange programs but except for two cities in the south of Sweden which had it on an experimental level for a long time it has not been implemented by the counties that if you used to do it. We are not for it. Which of course was our natural instinct to be against it. Why should you help people using drugs? You should help them not using drugs. When it comes to preventing HIV and hepatitis C the needle exchange programs are quite good and as I said the UN is promoting this.