Slavko Sakoman
Croatia
Professor of psychiatry and senior scientist with tenure, University of Zagreb), primarius, was born on October 4th 1947, is married with two children and lives in Zagreb. Since 1976 he has been a neuropsychiatry specialist, more precisely specializing in addiction. He is employed at the KBC "Sestre milosrdnice" hospital as the head of the Institute of addiction disorders. He is also employed part-time as a researcher and research advisor at the "Ivo Pilar" institute. He heads the Referral center to the Ministry of Health on drug addiction. He is a collaborative member of Croatian Academy of Medical Sciences. He is a member of the Expert Council of the Governments Office for fighting drug abuse.
Since the beginning of the 1980s he has been heading the Department of Drug Addiction and has been working on the epidemiology of addiction. Until 1990, he had created and managed the National Register of treated alcoholics. In 1981, he began implementing drug treatment programs of addicts in the prison system. In the mid-eighties, he launched an initiative to develop harm reduction programs, with the aim of preventing the spread of HIV and hepatitis virus infections.
From the year 1990 to the year 2000 he was the president of the Office for Combating Narcotic Drug Abuse. He drafted the National Strategy for Combating Drug Abuse which the Croatian Government and Parliament adopted in 1996. He is directly involved in implementing the National Program, thus creating a foundation of modern control systems in relation to drug abuse in the country. He developed network of county coordinating bodies for combating addiction, an outpatient network of drug addiction treatment center and he introduced the implementation of contemporary pharmacotherapy of opiate agonists (methadone 1991, buprenorphine 2003.).
He developed an original model of school-based prevention of substance abuse and directly educated the professionals in this system in order to integrate it into the educational process. From 1996 until 2002 he was an appointed permanent correspondent of the Republic of Croatia in the Pompidou Group, the Council of Europe, Strasbourg. In the recent years, he has been working on developing systems for the protection and improvement of mental health. He is the expert supervisor of the mental health, prevention and treatment of addiction Office of the county institutes of public health. He has been teaching at the University since 1978. Today, as a full time professor, he teaches undergraduate courses in psychology and dentistry studies, and graduate courses at the Medical Faculty.
He was the head of several research projects and he organized numerous trainings for professionals who are in any way concerned with the phenomenon of addiction. As a co-author he has published nine and independently he has published four books of which the most significant was a scientific study of the "Ivo Pilar" Institute as a publisher of "A society without drugs?". He also published about 150 scientific expert works. Since 1976 he has been involved in psychiatric forensics. As a psychiatrist, he has been continuously and directly involved in the treatment of hundreds and hundreds of the worst-case drug addicts over the past 35 years.
“CROATIA AND THE EU ZONE, OPIATE ADDICTION, TREATMENT POLICY”