Norway will begin testing a free heroin program in order to help some of its drug-addicted citizens, its health minister said on Friday. 

The Scandinavian country has one of the highest drug mortality rate in Europe, with about 81 deaths per million in 2015, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. The country is behind its neighbors Estonia, which has a drug overdose rate of 132 deaths per million, and Sweden with has about 22 deaths per million people.

In the U.S., 115 people die every day from opioid overdoses including drugs like heroin, pain relievers and fentanyl, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"We hope that this will provide a solution that will give... a better quality of life to some addicts who are today out of our reach and whom current programmes do not help enough," Health Minister Bente Hoie wrote on Facebook, according to the AFP.

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