AHS Views

When it gets to the point where a county medical examiner says he would never let someone in his family take a specific prescription drug unless they were a heroin addict. you know you’re dealing with a dangerous drug. And that’s exactly what Hillsborough County, Florida, Medical Examiner, Vernard Adams, said about methadone. As methadone is involved in an increasing and alarming number of deaths, anyone taking methadone would be wise to get immediate drug addiction help to get off the drug.

Florida is pretty much known as the prescription drug capitol of the U.S., and methadone is a big part of the problem. What’s even more alarming is that many of the methadone-related deaths occur when the drug is taken exactly as directed.

Doctors are prescribing methadone for pain more than ever due to the addictive properties of OxyContin and it’s potential for abuse. Prior to this change, most of the people using methadone were heroin addicts taking methadone as a legal, but still highly addictive, substitute for heroin.

Now that methadone is becoming more a part of the mainstream instead of being associated with the illegal drug culture, it’s getting more attention and becoming known as the extremely dangerous drug that it is.

If you or someone you know is taking methadone for any reason, help them get the methadone addiction help services they need. You could save their life. 

Not too many people paid an awful lot of attention to methadone when it was used primarily as a substitute drug for heroin addicts. But now that it’s used as a painkiller and the death toll is rising, it’s in the news. Perhaps the increase in methadone-related deaths will prompt the right people to realize what an abomination methadone ‘treatment’ really is and heroin addicts may start to get the addiction help they need instead of being put onto another addictive, dangerous drug.

What took them so long? I suspect that junkies dying didn’t come as a surprise to anyone, and wasn’t particularly newsworthy. You don’t see too many stories about how many junkies are dying from methadone, although the number of methadone-related deaths have been about double those related to heroin. And many more people take heroin than methadone.

Thinking of getting into a methadone maintenance program? If someone is telling you that’s the way to go, forget it. Contact a medical drug detox program that can get you through withdrawal and into drug rehab. And if you’re already on methadone, do the same. You don’t have to settle for replacing one drug addiction for another. Get the addiction help services you need.

For some, the idea of drug rehabilitation went out the window when the methadone clinic was introduced. Now, instead of getting addicts through drug rehab, they are being kept “in treatment” for life while being given no actual solution for their heroin addiction.

I just read an article about a methadone clinic in Madison, Wisconsin that has 300 people lined up every morning for their methadone. One of the guys has been coming there for 10 years.

Last week I spoke with a mother whose daughter just got kicked out of a methadone program because she could not afford the $125.00 per week they were charging her to stay on drugs. The mother was upset because she couldn’t understand why her daughter had to stay on a drug and pay for it every week. Good question.

Many people complain about the cost of drug rehab. But the cost of methadone at $125/week for 10 years is less than you’d have to pay for a successful drug rehab program, and the person would be off drugs – which is why they went into treatment in the first place. Which route makes more sense?

Originally posted on Tuesday, February 6, 2007

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, there are approximately 136,000 current heroin users in the United States. This number has remained relatively even over the last four years.

Heroin addicts who want help will try just about anything to stop. Often, after attempting traditional counseling methods and relapsing, heroin addicts will try a drug replacement therapy such as methadone.

Methadone is a powerful synthetic narcotic that was thought to be useful in getting people off of heroin. While proponents claim it reduces other harm associated with heroin use, methadone abuse on the street has grown as much as the legal clinics.

The 2005 national treatment survey reported that the number and proportion of clients receiving methadone increased from 172,502 (17 percent of all clients) in 2000 to 235,836 in 2005 (22 percent of all clients).

This means that there are nearly 100,000 more people on methadone than using heroin on a regular basis.

Along with the increase in overall users has come an increase in the number of methadone-related deaths. In a few areas, methadone has become the most deadliets drug, such as Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that there were no methadone-related deaths in 1995, but last year there were 113. The overall number of deaths associated with this drug has been rapidly increasing in many states throughout the country.

While a special report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) attributes the increase in deaths to the rise in number of prescriptions for it as a painkiller rather than a substitute for heroin, the amount given to patients has gone up in both categories, and so has the availability on the street.

So Why Use it?

If it’s such a dangerous drug, then why are there so many users? It actually comes down to money and mis-representation.

Some methadone clinics are not-for-profit corporations, but there is a growing trend of for-profit companies expanding their drug-dispensing enterprises. For example, an article in the Charleston Daily Mail says that all of the methadone clinics in West Virginia are for-profit businesses.

One Methadone clinic that is for sale in the southwestern U.S. serving less than 500 clients claims to make at between 500K and 1 million dollars per year between cash business and government reimbursements. That’s just one clinic.

Regardless of whether the clinic is for-profit or not, imagine how much money the drug’s makers receive. 235,000 clients times 365 days times a few dollars per dose, plus chronic pain patients’ prescriptions - equals big money for pharmaceutical companies.

Rehabilitation for Methadone Use

For those addicts wanting to get off methadone, most drug rehabilitation programs can’t take someone who is on too high of a dose of methadone. This can range anywhere from 15-60 milligrams, depending on the facility. The conflict is that an average daily dose of methadone is often well above that. The reason for this is that the withdrawal symptoms from methadone are actually more severe and longer lasting that heroin.

Therefore, addicts have a choice to either slowly wean down their dosage, which might be 5 milligrams per week, or enter a medical detoxification center that can help them do it faster and in a controlled environment. One such facility is Novus Detox near Tampa Bay (www.novusdetox.com).

At Addiction Help Services, we strongly recommend a drug-free program, meaning one that doesn’t use any medications or substitute drugs to help rehabilitate addicts. In the long run, a replacement drug may be a temporary treatment, but it is not helping someone rehabilitate to live a drug-free life.

Article by Eric Mitchell