Past Welcome Speech Mr. Bora Isik, City Councillor for ISAM 2003 Wednesday 24 September 2003 Stadhuis Amsterdam 20.00 Dear participants and honoured members of the board of the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM); it is a great privilege for me to welcome you to the wonderful and exciting city of Amsterdam on behalf of the mayor Mr. Job Cohen. Amsterdam is a well-known and much beloved city to many tourist from all over the world. It continuously offers a great variety of monuments, cultural activities and exciting events. In a way, Amsterdam is living history and ongoing cultural festival. However, Amsterdam is also a city where people live, love and work and where some of its inhabitants suffer from bad luck and diseases. Sometimes Amsterdam is called the "drug city" of Europe, because of its' liberal attitude towards cannabis use, the presence of coffee shops and smart shops, and the control over the quality of party drugs by some of the addiction treatment centres. For some people these aspects of Amsterdam have very positive connotations, for others It is one of the few negative sides of Amsterdam. However, Amsterdam can also be called the drug treatment city of Europe, because of its' comprehensive treatment system for alcohol and drug dependent people. Amsterdam was one of the first cities in the world with a well-functioning, freely accessible and highly effective methadone maintenance program, currently serving more than 50% of all heroin dependent patients. Amsterdam was also one of the first places in the world where needle exchange programs were introduced in order to prevent an outbreak of HIV and AIDS among injecting drug addicts. Finally, Amsterdam is one of the six cities in The Netherlands where the effect of the medical prescription of heroin to chronic treatment resistant heroin addicts was tested; a study with positive results that was recently published in the prestigious British Medical Journal. However, Amsterdam is also the place where compulsive treatment options for highly criminal drug abusers are implemented and tested. In short, Amsterdam is a city with a broad and comprehensive treatment offer for those citizens that encounter problems with drugs of abuse and subsequently cause public nuisance to the other citizens. It is this balance of approaches that makes Amsterdam unique in Europe and the world. Together, the Municipal Health Services, the Jellinek Addiction Treatment Centre, and many other social agencies provide high level services to the alcohol and drug dependent people in Amsterdam. They do this in close and generally very productive collaboration with the police and parole officers. Amsterdam is proud of its' balanced approach combining repression in cases of criminal behavior and treatment for those in need. Amsterdam is also proud that it houses two universities and several academic research institutes that deal with issues related to alcohol and drug dependence. At the Free University of Amsterdam frontline animal research is conducted by Ton Schoffelmeer and his group. The University of Amsterdam is involved in the study of criminological aspects of drugs under the leadership of Dirk Korf and in clinical research by the group of Wim van den Brink and Gerard Schippers. Finally, the director of the Municipal Health Services, Roel Coutinho, also holds a position as a professor of virology at the Academic Medical Centre investigating HIV and Hepatitis C in homosexuals and intravenous drug users. In short, Amsterdam is not only the so called drug city of Europe, and it is not only the drug treatment city of Europe, but it is also an important addiction research city in Europe with many fine researchers and important research projects. It is therefore that we are very happy that we can host the Fifth Annual Meeting of the International Society of Addiction Medicine in Amsterdam. It is a firmly held conviction of the city and its' policy makers that addiction is not just a form of moral weakness or delinquent behavior, but that addiction is a serious disease with very nasty complications for the patient, his direct environment and the city as a whole. Integrated medical, psychological and social interventions, either voluntary or with pressure, are needed to deal with these patients and to protect the city against addiction related nuisance. It is the balance between these approaches that the city of Amsterdam constantly seeks to preserve with attention and compassion to both the alcohol or drug addict and the average citizen. I hope that your conference will contribute to better medical treatments and to a better integration of these and other types of interventions, both at the individual patient level en at the level of the city as a whole. With this hope and expectation, I now declare the Fifth Annual Meeting of the International Society of Addiction Medicine opened.