The government should get involved with the cure to opiate addiction through the use of the Methadone program in order to reduce crime death disease and drug use
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.
The volunteers were given access to the spectrum of opiates available to medical practitioners. Methadone treatment is also an important point of contact with service providers and supplies an opportunity to teach drug users harm reduction techniques such as how to prevent HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and other health problems that endanger drug users. In attempting to determine if addicts could be maintained on stable doses of pharmaceutical opiates. Methadone drastically reduces, and often eliminates, heroin use among addicts. ) Often, use of other drugs-including cocaine, sedatives, and even alcohol - also declines when an opiate addict enters methadone treatment, even though methadone has no direct pharmacological effect on non-opiate drug craving. html) And then something completely unexpected happened. The addicts were either over sedated or in mild withdrawal most of the time, and spent their days either "on the nod", waiting for their next shot, or comparing the relative merits of the drugs used. Methadone has no adverse effects on motor skills, mental capacity, or employability. Washington, DC: National Academy Press; 1995:22. 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 panels examined the problem and by 1963 had come to the same conclusion: it was time to re-examine nearly fifty years of prohibition and consider allowing doctors to prescribe addicts the opiates they needed. Compared to the other major drug treatment modalities-drug-free outpatient treatment, therapeutic communities, and chemical dependency treatment-methadone is the most rigorously studied and has yielded the best results. Harm reduction: A public health strategy.
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