http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-04/11/content_7960323.htm

HANOI, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam's southern Ho Chi Minh City is using methadone, a synthetic narcotic, as a therapeutic tool to rehabilitate drug addicts, according to local newspaper Saigon Liberation on Friday.

Under the city's pilot drug detoxification plan, 750 drug addicts are to use methadone orally for a certain period, and then undergo methadone withdrawal instead of the more severe withdrawal of such drugs as heroin and opium.

Earlier, Vietnam's Health Ministry permitted a foreign-funded project on using methadone on pilot basis to rehabilitate 700 local drug addicts in northern Hai Phong city in the 2007-2008 period.

Vietnam has recently paid greater attention to the methadone therapy, which has been conducted in many countries for years, partly because it wants to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS among infected narcotics addicts who often use the same injecting equipment like syringes.

According to many foreign and local experts, methadone maintenance, being oral, breaks the dangerous ritual of intravenous injection, and eliminates the addict's need to commit crimes to pay for drugs.

Vietnam annually spotted, on average, 9,000 drug addicts nationwide in the 1996-2006 period. Now, it has some 170,000 drug addicts, 68.3 percent of whom are aged under 30, according to statistics released at a national anti-narcotics review meeting in February.