A German experiment where heroin addicts are given the drug for free by the government is about to end, and some experts are calling the program a success, the BBC reported June 4.

The three-year program in Hamburg and six other cities supplies about 500 longtime heroin users with diamorphine, a chemically pure version of heroin. Supporters and participants say it has allowed users to work and maintain a relatively normal life.

Based on a similar Swiss project, the German heroin program aimed to compare heroin maintenance to methadone maintenance for opiate addicts. Participants in the project had failed at methadone maintenance in the past.

Researchers found that the heroin group fared better than participants in methadone maintenance. "Those on heroin stayed in treatment longer and the drop out is less than the methadone group," said researcher Christian Haasen of the University of Hamburg. "They had much less illicit drug use, using street heroin and cocaine, and so have better health records."

Of 90 heroin users who go to the Hamburg clinic to get the drug, 40 are now employed. Ludovic Leblanc, 32, is considered a success story: he gets two daily heroin injections at the clinic but works as a waiter at one of Hamburg's best Italian restaurants. His heroin dosage is now a quarter of what it was two years ago, and he hopes to be off the drug completely in a year.

"I couldn't have dreamed of that on methadone," he said. "After a year and a half on methadone, the dose stayed the same and I would go to get street heroin almost every night."

About 10 percent of program participants are similarly cutting down on their dose of heroin and "moving toward abstinence," officials said. Germany's heroin-overdose death rate is down, and police say that Hamburg's open drug scene has dwindled.

But the new conservative German government is less supportive of the program than their predecessors, questioning the program's cost benefits (heroin maintenance is more expensive that methadone maintenance).

"The results for the heroin group were only slightly better than those of the methadone group, and they may have been due to other factors than solely the prescription of heroin, like better social-services support and things like that," said Hamburg health minister Diedrich Wersich. "For us to give patients a daily kick on heroin cannot be seen as a permanent solution. Instead, we have to work to get them drug-free, and how can you say that's being done if the government is giving them a kick on heroin every day ... and besides will the taxpayer be prepared to pay for this?"