Vancouver has been in the spotlight for its controversial "safe-injection" program for drug users, but a new plan to fight addiction and crime in the city relies on more conventional interventions: legal substitution pharmaceuticals like methadone.

The Canadian Press reported Feb. 26 that Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan unveiled the new Chronic Addiction Substitution Treatment (CAST) project by citing its bipartisan support. Sullivan said the plan to offer legal substitutes for a variety of illegal street drugs could help prevent crimes like aggressive panhandling, auto theft, shoplifting, and property crime by addicts seeking money to buy drugs.

Vancouver is anxious to address some of its stubborn social problems ahead of hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. Unlike the safe-injection site, CAST doesn't need approval from Canada's conservative government because all the substitute drugs involved are legal.

Treatment referrals would be built into the CAST system. Vancouver also recently established a new drug-court system.

CAST will involve methadone for opiate addicts as well as other possible substitutes for other drugs, like cocaine. For example, Vancouver could follow the lead of some European nations in providing pharmaceutical-grade heroin or slow-release morphine to addicts for whom methadone is not an option, such as cocaine addicts, said David Marsh, an addiction medicine expert with the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

Many of Vancouver's addicts would take part in the CAST project, predicted physician John Blatherwick. "Most of them know they have a problem and most of them know that a continuing down the line from injection drugs can lead to death from HIV, from hepatitis C, from things that are in those concoctions that they're sticking in their arms," he said.