PUT METHADONE CLINICS WHERE THEY'RE NEEDED

Drug addiction afflicts all of Virginia - rural, suburban and urban. Drug
treatment should be accessible in all of Virginia as well.

The numbers couldn't be clearer: Virginia has a serious illicit-drug problem.

An estimated 92,000 Virginians are dependent on an illegal drug, according
to federal statistics from 2000-01, and 10,000 of them are children ages 12-17.

Some 5.5 percent of all Virginians reported on a federal survey in the same
period that they had used an illegal drug such as marijuana, cocaine or
heroin in the past month. The rate was 8.5 percent among children 12-17.
Virginia law enforcement officers made 637,000 drug arrests in 2001.

But contrary to persistent stereotypes, the people represented by those
statistics are not all poor and minority junkies stumbling around urban
alleyways.

They are us.

In addition to its traditional urban users, heroin has risen in popularity
in the well-to-do suburbs of Tidewater and Northern Virginia, according to
federal drug reports. Abuse of another opioid, the painkiller OxyContin, is
pervasive in the rural Southwest. It's the most commonly abused drug in
Western Virginia overall, as the growth in methadone clinics attests.

Virginia addicts are, in fact, white, black, Hispanic and Asian; rich, poor
and middle-class; rural, urban and suburban.

Such statistics cry out for easily accessible treatment wherever needed.
Every addict weaned from drugs is a life saved, a productive worker
recovered, a family spared further anguish, a community spared potential
crimes.

But legislation still pending in the General Assembly to tightly restrict
methadone clinics would move Virginia in the opposite direction.
Roanoke-area lawmakers, pressing the excited concerns of some constituents
over proposed operations in their neighborhoods, would severely limit the
location of future clinics, potentially pushing them out of cities and
towns and out of easy reach of the residents who need them.

As many as 6,000 Virginians may now be receiving methadone therapy,
according to an official with the Department of Mental Health, Mental
Retardation and Substance Abuse, but that's a fraction of those who need it.

The proposed legislation could only worsen that imbalance. Whatever risks
clinics might pose should be addressed through strict regulation and
supervision. The greater danger, to the afflicted and to communities in the
long run, would be if treatment were rendered inaccessible.