Methadone, a long-acting synthetic narcotic analgesic, was first used in the maintenance treatment of drug addiction in the mid-1960s by Drs. Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswander of Rockefeller University. There are now 115,000 methadone maintenance patients in the United States, 40,000 of whom are in New York State and about half that many are in California. Methadone is widely employed throughout the world, and is the most effective known treatment for heroin addiction.
             The goal of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) is to reduce illegal heroin use and the crime, death, and disease associated with heroin addiction. Methadone can be used to detoxify heroin addicts, but most heroin addicts who detox-using methadone or any other method-return to heroin use. Therefore, the goal of MMT is to reduce and even eliminate heroin use among addicts by stabilizing them on methadone for as long as is necessary to help them avoid returning to previous patterns of drug use. The benefits of MMT have been established by hundreds of scientific studies, and there are almost no negative health consequences of long-term methadone treatment, even when it continues for twenty or thirty years.
             Methadone maintenance treatment came into being in an unexpected way. By 1963,doctors and public health workers had concluded what objective observers and users alike had known for decades: that there was no treatment known which could cure long term opiate (heroin, morphine, opium etc.) addicts. In fact, there wasn't even any treatment that could honestly claim to be more successful than no treatment at all! Every imaginable option had been tried, from lobotomies and insulin shock, to psychoanalysis and the threat of lifetime imprisonment. Yet in every case the result was the same: between 70 and 90 percent of these chronic addicts would return to opiates within a short time. In light of such statistics a number of prestigious pa...