Methadone maintenance can also be an addiction and poses a long term problem for addicts seeking end their addiction if used incorrectly and abused. Here is a look into the lives of a couple of stubborn hardcore Philadelphia junkies, abusing methadone. Jeff Deeney, a Philadelphia social worker writes about two drug addicts in the context of considering heroin maintenance in a piece call Get Me My Legal Heroin. Regarding the abuse or proper use of methadone, another link to an article called, Do Methadone Prescriptions Do More Harm Than Help sheds some light on the complexity of addicts and methadone maintenance. You be the judge. Heroin addiction is not the only drug issue out there, but it has managed to trap many of out family members in life of torment. Methadone hasn’t always helped much either. How do we stop this madness? What does our government need to do to really help get under drug addiction in America? links by Mary S.
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June 24, 2010 at 11:55 pm
KEITH
yea there is the negitive aspects of methadone, they seem to outweigh the positive aspects most of the time. around my area, id say about 1 out of 5 people going to the local clinic is on the clinic for life saving/life changing reasons. they go, get their doses(mostly takehomes) and leave and go to work. they go once a week or once every 2 weeks and arn’t stuck to going daily (the ones stuck to going daily are the ones failing drug tests for other drugs(legal and illegal)) the legal drugs are the ones they dont have an rx for which 99% of the time is benzos(anti anxeity meds), k-pin, adivan, the most famous xanax. so if u go out and use and fail a test u get ur privlages taken off of you. so what the people do here is get an rx for benzos from a doc so they are covered cause the clinic dont check the levels of benzos in you. so they can go get their dose, pop some benzos, go home and nod out all day long. ive seen people here nodding at like 10pm at nite from a 6am dose of methadone(with benzos added thru day). but yea 1 out of 5 is my stats. and for that one person that is going down on their dose and weening and going to work raising kids has good life, then by all means the clinc should reamain there.
what i dont get is why people can continue to use and just be smacked in the hand and have to go back daily when they come up dirty on a drug test. so the clnic is saying its not ok to smoke crack but if you do, you can come back tomm and get ur dose, you loose ur take homes for 6 months. thats what i dont get. the clnic here tells people if they have cravings below 70mg to use. i know crazy right. i had a friend that died of a methadone overdose last week, he took his dose, and had takehomes and took anouther dose (300mg total). and went brain dead, they pulled the plug and buryed him cause of this legal drug.
June 26, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Tom at Recovery Helpdesk
Bill, you know I admire your work and am a regular reader of your site. In fact, I dedicated a recent blog post to you as a way to express that. But I have to say I’m quite puzzled and disappointed to read this post on your site.
Methadone maintenance is certainly not an addiction. The first few lines of this post are likely to lead readers to a serious misunderstanding about medication-assisted treatment, the differences between methadone and heroin, and what it means to be addicted to a substance.
Opiate dependence is diagnosed and defined under the DSM-IV TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) by the existence of a “maladaptive pattern” of opiate use leading to “clinically significant impairment or distress.”
The diagnostic term “opiate dependence” is a term of art that is really about more than just physical dependence on the drug.
Opiate dependent people use opiates in an unhealthy way, and they persist in this unhealthy pattern of use in spite of negative consequences.
Most of us call this “addiction.”
This is why the person recovering from surgery who is physically dependent on opiates (they would go into physical withdrawal if they abruptly stopped taking opiates) would not be diagnosed as “opiate dependent” under the DSM-IV TR. The surgery patient is taking the opiates in a healthy way that results in positive consequences –not in a maladaptive way that results in negative consequences.
Like the surgery patient, the methadone maintenance patient is taking methadone in a healthy way that results in many positive consequences.
It is irresponsible and destructive to make statements like “methadone maintenance is also an addiction.” Especially on a blog intended for individuals and families who are looking for accurate information about addiction and recovery.
This is a good way to discourage people from learning about methadone treatment –a treatment that the top experts at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Disease Control (CDC) describe as the “most effective treatment for opiate addiction.”
I have a methadone page on my site http://www.recoveryhelpdesk.com that I hope you will consider referring people to in the future. I think they will get a more accurate understanding of the risks and benefits of methadone treatment.
June 26, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Bill Ford
Thanks for the clarification Tom. I do not want to alter the intent of the post too much since it is published but your comments present a very good counter point to many who do not view methadone favorably. I suspect they are the same people who do not embrace the urgency of addiction as a national health issue. I agree with what you are saying. It is worth it for people to see this exchange. I did change one thing in my post to be fair to the subject and clarified that “methadone can be an addiction if abused…”. Without question, it has been invaluable to many addicts in their recovery and integration back into society who have used it correctly. I also removed the linear comparison to heroin. I apologize to all of the remarkable souls whom have found recovery in this way. I do however, see quite a few young addicts who abuse the hell out of it. Families interested and invested in these people’s recovery need to know that as well. Keith, in the first post, sheds light on some aspects of methadone abuse. I support your work and would love to send people your way. BILL