NYC WANTS METHADONE ADDICTS TO KICK HABIT

NEW YORK -- Despite dire warnings from experts on drug abuse, New York is
about to begin a strong push to get its addicts off methadone, something no
other major U.S. city has attempted.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has governed the nation's biggest city like a
stern Victorian father, applying the rod to jaywalkers, horn-honkers and
squeegee men who insist on cleaning windshields for spare change, argues
that methadone users have traded one addiction for another.

"I think methadone is an enslaver," he said recently. "If you're going to
keep somebody permanently enslaved to methadone for the rest of their
lives, then I have real questions about your common sense."

New York City has by far the largest number of methadone patients in the
nation.

Under the City Hall plan, the 2,000 or so methadone patients at city-run
hospitals will be pushed to wean themselves from the liquid heroin
substitute within a few months. Giuliani also has urged the approximately
30,000 patients getting methadone in private clinics in New York to go clean.

The weaning approach will include counseling and job training. Giuliani has
called it "a more difficult but much more loving and caring attempt to try
to integrate into a person the ability to take care of their own life."

The plan has shocked many public health experts, who mostly praise
methadone as a way to help heroin users break their addiction without going
cold turkey.

"Close down methadone programs and (addicts) will be back on the streets,
back on drugs, and back on welfare," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the nation's
drug czar, said in a statement, calling Giuliani's plan "at odds with the
conclusions of the nation's scientific and medical community."

He said: "The problem isn't that there are too many methadone programs, it
is that there are too few."

"This has not been tried in any major city. There's a reason for it. They
know the outcome," said Mark Parrino, president of the American Methadone
Treatment Organization, which represents 650 methadone programs.

"The first thing that will happen is that 80 percent of these people will
relapse," Parrino said. He called the plan "an incredibly risky and
dangerous experiment."

Methadone, popularized some 30 years ago, is a narcotic that blunts heroin
addicts' craving for the street drug and eases the painful symptoms of
heroin withdrawal.

An estimated 115,000 former heroin addicts are enrolled in methadone
programs nationwide. Distribution programs are strictly regulated by
federal and state authorities.

"Methadone allows people who might otherwise be using illegal drugs to be
moving in society in a very functional way," said Charles King,
co-executive director of Housing Works, which provides housing for homeless
people with the AIDS virus.

Alice Perciballi, a 44-year-old former heroin addict who rides the subway
every morning to a basement clinic in the East Village to drink a few
ounces of methadone from a little plastic cup, said she is convinced she'd
be dead if it weren't for methadone.

Ms. Perciballi said the treatment has helped her stay clean and in control
for about five years. She works as a baby sitter and is studying for her
high-school equivalency degree.

"They think the jails are full now? Do you know what it would be like
without methadone?" she asked.

Checked-by: Pat Dolan