GENEVA - The world's most comprehensive legalised heroin programme became permanent with overwhelming approval from Swiss voters who simultaneously rejected the decriminalisation of marijuana.

The heroin programme, started in 1994, is offered in 23 centres across Switzerland. It helped eliminate large groups of drug users shooting up openly in Swiss city parks during the 1980s and 1990s and is credited with reducing crime and improving the health and daily lives of addicts.

Sixty-eight percent of the 2.26 million Swiss voters casting ballots Sunday approved making the heroin programme permanent.

By contrast, around 63.2 percent of voters voted against the marijuana proposal, which was based on a separate citizens' initiative to decriminalise the consumption of marijuana and growing the plant for personal use.

The nearly 1,300 selected addicts, who were not helped by other therapies, visit one of the centres twice a day to receive the carefully measured dose of heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory.

They keep their paraphernalia in cups labeled with their names and use the equipment and clean needles to inject themselves under the supervision of a nurse, and also receive counseling from psychiatrists and social workers.

The aim is to help the addicts learn how to function in society.

The United States and the UN narcotics board criticised the programme as potentially encouraging drug abuse, but it attracted attention from governments as far away as Australia and Canada, which recently started or considered starting their own programs modeled on the system.

The Netherlands started a smaller program in 2006, and it serves nearly 600 patients. Britain allowed individual doctors to prescribe heroin since the 1920s, but it ran trials similar to the Swiss approach in recent years. Belgium, Germany, Spain and are also running trial programmes.

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