Tucked away on this corner of Bern’s picturesque Old Town is something one might be surprised to find in clean, conservative Switzerland. This is a heroin prescription center for drug addicts. It’s 8 o’clock in the morning and they are already lining up because they’re about to be given their daily injections. Jason Luell is 36 years old and started using in 2000. Three years later, he was heavily addicted. I asked him what life was like then.

JASON LUELL: Terrible! Waking up, the first idea you is how to get drugs. I sold almost everything that had value at home. I didn’t do any robbery or anything like that. I was against that. But I lost my friends; I sold everything. The little bit of money that I got from the state went to drugs. I was down to around 59-60 kilos. So I was quite skinny and had bad skin. Didn’t look good at all and didn’t feel good either.

Luell came to this clinic after trying to quit dozens of times before. Now three and half years later, he has nearly weaned himself off heroin and onto methadone. Plus, he’s been able to gain back weight, hold down a job, and make new friends - all the while taking regular injections. But there are some addicts who aren’t able to kick the habit. In fact, some of the patients have been injecting with the program since its start 15 years ago. A few have even reached senior citizen age. Dr. Christoph Buerki has been treating addicts since the early 90’s.

CHRISTOPH BUERKI: When patients enter this type of treatment, which is of course second-line treatment after all others have failed, they have roughly twelve years of heroin addiction already. They have made an average to ten attempts to stop. When it reaches that stage of over ten years of addiction, then heroin addiction is a chronic disease. It’s a chronic, relapsing disease. So for some patients they will probably not find a way out of this treatment because they have stabilized themselves in this treatment. They are able to live a relatively normal life again. So we have to face it there is a group of people that will grow old over the course of time in this treatment.

Even so, the program now has a firm legal basis. Sixty-eight percent of Swiss voters approved the new narcotic policy in the last referendum. And other countries are trying out similar heroin programs based on this model.

BUERKI:  We have a lot of foreign politicians, a lot of foreign journalist who come here and once they see what we do and how we do it in a very serious and professional manner – once they realize that heroin-assisted treatment, it’s not just giving out heroin, it’s treating patients, by among other things giving them heroin. Once the they realize that they don’t fall into this prejudice of thinking we’re giving heroin to heroin addicts and it’s unethical. What’s the alternative. Should we turn them down? Send them back to the street with all its dangers? Should we send them back to injecting bacterial cocktails in a spoon? I don’t think this is an alternative, for many people this is just not an alternative.

This is something that Jason Luell knows all too well.

LUELL: You can’t just push somebody that doesn’t function to not take drugs. You have to work with the person and give them a chance to work it out themselves. It doesn’t work if you just push them. I have enough experience in that. That’s not the right way to go.

Amy Wong, World Radio Switzerland, in Bern