De laatste vakminister: Els Borst-Eilers

The announcement of the appointment of Hugo de Jonge as the Netherlands Secretary of State for Health means that there is little chance of having a ‘specialist’ in this post in the near future. Els Borst-Eilers is generally considered to have been the last specialist Secretary of State for Health in the Netherlands. Whether or not she can rightly be considered to be a specialist, this was certainly the image that she cultivated and also used for political ends, for instance, to depoliticise sensitive issues. In this article, we highlight a particularly good example: the medical experiment involving providing approximately 700 long-term addicts with heroin under medical supervision, which Borst implemented with the consent of the Netherlands parliament in 1998.

Conflict of interest and financial support for this article: N. Beyens has received research grants from UMC Utrecht, AMC Amsterdam, Sanquin, the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen).