COUNSELOR - METHADONE CLINIC DESPERATELY NEEDED IN AREA

Having a methadone clinic in a neighborhood is safer than having active
drug addicts living there, a local drug and alcohol counselor says.

Ed Pane, executive director of the Serento Gardens drug and alcohol program
in Hazleton, lauded the approval by Luzerne County Court of a methadone
clinic in Plains Township.

Pane said such a clinic is desperately needed in Luzerne County.

"We are losing 97 percent of the heroin addicts we treat here because we
can't keep them," Pane said. "The heroin overdose death rate in Luzerne
County is higher than the rate in Brooklyn. Aside from alcohol, heroin is
the second biggest problem we have."

Pane said the clinic will treat heroin addicts by giving them methadone,
then slowly weaning them off it.

"This is not a maintenance program," Pane said. "When a person goes into
this program, they are given a like amount of methadone to start, but then
are slowly weaned off it. It takes, on the average, about 18 months."

Having an active drug addict live near you is more dangerous than the
clinic, Pane said.

"A person with a $200-a-day habit has to steal around $3,000 a day to
support," Pane said, referring to the fact that they have to re-sell the
merchandise they steal, and get whatever they can for it. "It creates a
tremendous amount of crime. In this clinic, it will cost about $7 a day to
treat them. Incarceration costs about $50 a day.

"It is not the answer, but it is an answer," Pane said. "I compliment Mike
Donahue, the county's drug and alcohol director, and Choices, for hanging
in there with this program."

The Plains Township Zoning Board had rejected the clinic, saying it did not
fit the description of clinic in the township zoning code.

So applicants appealed the case to Luzerne County Court, where Judge
Gifford Cappellini Wednesday overturned the zoning board's decision, saying
the zoning board used a "narrow interpretation" of the law to deny the clinic.

The site of the clinic is in a commercial industrial park, which includes
other medical clinics.