SAN FRANCISCO CONSIDERS BIGGER METHADONE PROGRAM

Addiction: Lack Of Availability Keeps Many Heroin Users From Getting Treatment.

San Francisco - When former thief and drug pusher Walter Lamarr Williams
wanted to kick his 14-year heroin habit, he turned to the most successful
treatment method: methadone.

Williams made it through detox, but when he got out, there was no room for
another patient in this heroin-plagued city's busy methadone clinics.

"The time I was waiting, I was using," he said glumly on Wednesday,
remembering the drug use that possibly gave him HIV and hepatitis C.

It was another two months before Williams got back into detox, and another
three months before he finally got into a methadone clinic. Other addicts
are less diligent. Faced with delays, some abandon treatment permanently.
The shortage of methadone treatment in San Francisco - 2,000 clinic slots
for 13,000 to 15,000 addicts - has led city officials to look at expanding
the drug's availability The Board of Supervisors is considering whether to
seek state and federal permission to allow doctors in private offices to
prescribe the drug.

If the effort is successful, San Francisco would be the first city in the
nation to use private doctors for methadone treatment on a widespread basis.
Canada, Denmark and other nations already allow it, and limited trials are
under way in New York City, Baltimore and Connecticut.

Some people are deeply ambivalent about methadone, which is addictive but
gets users high only for the first month or so of use.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani last year made a high-profile effort to get
methadone users to quit. He backed down after only 16 of the city's 2,100
clinic patients successfully stopped using methadone.

No serious opposition has arisen in San Francisco, which has a serious
heroin problem. The city ranks third in the nation in herion-related
emergency-room admissions despite being only the 14th most populated city in
the nation.

Dolore Lucas, a 39-year-old methadone user, said she supports expanding the
drug's availability.

She became addicted to heroin when she was a 17-year-old runaway,
hitchhiking across country. She has a face scarred by years of addiction,
disease and life on the streets, and says she is infected with hepatitis C
and HIV. To support her habit, she sold drugs and her body.

"I shot anything I could get my hands on," she remembers, her bottle of
cherry-flavored methadone tucked into her pocket.

Since she went on methadone about six years ago, she has been clean and
allowed to see her 11-year-old son, she said Wednesday.

A fellow patient, 43-year-old John Bogacki says he would appreciate going to
a pharmacy rather than a clinic.

"It would be more convenient, more like any other medication. You wouldn't
always feel like big brother was looking over your shoulder," he said.

Last September, the move to make methadone available through pharmacies
gained the support of the White House.