MIDDLE-CLASS ADDICTS

Local Methadone Clinic Sees Growing Numbers

Newburgh - He was middle class. A single parent with three kids. Handsome,
he was a fast lane kind of guy. Lawyer girlfriend. Country club social life.

Sure, he'd had trouble with painkillers. But he never saw himself as weak
enough to go on hard dope.

Today, Frank's one of a growing number of white, middle-class heroin addicts
checking in at the drab, pink, one-story building on Commercial Place, right
off busy Walsh's Road in Newburgh.

Heroin is big again, says a report by the National Drug Intelligence Center.
The number of people being treated for heroin addiction jumped to 32,000
statewide last year from 29,000 in 1997.

In 1999 alone, there were 179,000 treatment admissions for heroin addiction
in the U.S.

Locally, people in need of treatment are beating a steady path to the St.
Luke's Hospital Unity Center for Recovery methadone program in Newburgh.

There, the $1.2-million-a-year methadone program treats 260 patients. That
number's way up from the 167 patients who sought treatment back in 1988.

And the numbers alone don't tell the story. Where the addicts come from -
many far from inner-city streets - might tell a truer tale.

Most come from Sullivan County towns with rippling streams, from southern
Ulster County's rolling hills and from Orange County's middle-class suburbs.

Some have a long drive.

Gloria gets up at 4:30. She's a single mom and a convenience store cashier.
She takes her place in the dosing line as dawn breaks some days.

Frank's right behind her.

If not for methadone, Frank (not his real name) thinks he'd be dead by now.
Dead or crazy.

Several years ago, Frank kept hearing this 1970s song by the Hollies ringing
in his head: "Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and to love
you."

"You" was heroin, Frank says, "wrapping a warm fuzzy blanket around each
cell of my body."

Methadone, a controlled substance, blocks the effects of opiates and removes
those cravings.

With heroin on the rise again, methadone is what the U.S. Government
Accounting Office calls a major life preserver.

On the street, heroin's purer than ever and cheap, too: $20 for enough to
keep someone high for the day.

"Matter of fact, in the most recent drug raids, they've all been heroin
operations," says Newburgh police Chief William Bloom. "In the last two
years, heroin's becoming the drug of choice again - it's cyclical."

And it's a beast that doesn't give up its prey easily once it has its claws
hooked in.

Frank found out the hard way.

It was Christmas Eve. Frank, a corporation executive, had just broken up
with the girlfriend he'd planned to marry, the woman who was his life.

"I felt like I'd lost my entire world," he says. "It was just me now and I
couldn't face that.

"I sat on my parents' bed and just cried and cried."

He knew a friend who shot dope. They'd both been pain-killer abusers, but
Frank was strong enough to kick that habit.

Frank called his friend. In 15 minutes, "my friend laid out a small line of
white powder on the kitchen countertop, and with a little straw, I inhaled."

He had his first heroin high.

"I was totally at peace," Frank says.

Painful loss was now "unadulterated pleasure."

"Heroin became essential to my feeling of self-esteem and self-worth," Frank
says.

For the next 20 years, Frank tried to get clean.

"I spent time in multiple rehabs, therapeutic communities and tried the
12-step willpower meetings - about 5,000 of them."

Heroin had him hooked good.

Until, that is, he sucked up the courage to try methadone.

Not without controversy, critics have called methadone nothing more than a
replacement drug for heroin. The best way out, say critics like U.S. Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz., are the 12 steps. There's a definite stigma to its
use, Unity administrator Ira Wolff says, labeling critics as misinformed.

Even Frank admits: "Methadone seemed like the worst idea I ever had."

Except when he tried to get himself straight without it.

"I felt like I'd been run over by a truck when I tried withdrawal that way,"
he says. "The craving was totally overwhelming."

Most methadone patients hold down jobs and live normal lives because of the
quarter-sized, bitter, orange tablet and counseling.

They stand in line to get it at big windows flanked by pale yellowish walls,
and a hopeful sign put on the wall by clinic nurse Amy Finnegan: "Shoot for
the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."

Along with the pills, they're serving up hope on this dead-end street where
lives are turned around.

For the patients, there's the hope that they'll beat the heroin addiction.
And for many, it's hope that one day the methadone won't even be needed.

Someday, Frank may get totally free of medication. Many do. It's kind of
like cigarettes, says Ira Wolff, "some go cold turkey, some never do it."

But methadone does take away the gut-wrenching need - and you don't get high
from it.

All Frank knows is this: "I woke up one day and I didn't feel the need to
cop. I could sit down with my kids and do homework without worrying if I
would have enough dope left to get me well in the morning."