IN METHADONE CLINICS, YOUNGER CLIENTS

The drug is a treatment of last resort for heroin addicts. Now it's helping
OxyContin addicts.

Andrew Glinka was 17 when he first tried OxyContin, a powerful prescription
painkiller.

What began as a fun high became a vicious, heroin-like addiction, racking
his body with pain when the pills ran out.

Desperate for help after nearly two years, the Northeast Philadelphia teen
turned to a methadone clinic.

"This is my chance to get well," he said.

Bonnie, 21, who asked that her last name not be used to keep her OxyContin
addiction secret, also takes methadone for an addiction that started when
she was in high school in Delaware County. At first, she was scared of
methadone.

"That was, like, for drug addicts, which I didn't realize I was," she said.

These are the new faces of methadone: young, white, and often from the suburbs.

Once considered the last resort of aging heroin junkies, methadone is
increasingly being used to treat addiction to OxyContin, particularly among
younger people.

"A 20-year-old? You never saw that at a methadone clinic," said Leo Roshon,
a counselor at Parkside Recovery, a clinic in West Philadelphia.

There is no comprehensive survey showing the trend, but anecdotal evidence
indicates a shift in the types of clients methadone clinics are admitting
here. Methadone is also being used to treat widespread OxyContin addiction
in southwestern Pennsylvania and in other states, including Kentucky and
West Virginia.

OxyContin contains a powerful dose of time-released oxycodone, a
semi-synthetic opiate. The drug was introduced in 1996 as a painkiller.

Abusers break the time-released coating by chewing the tablets or crushing
and snorting the powder. The effect is a heroin-like high.

According to a federal survey, oxycodone was involved in 48 deaths in
Philadelphia in 2001 and 41 in 2000. These include cases in which oxycodone
was found in the body but may not have contributed to the death.

The eight-county Philadelphia region had 89 such deaths in 2001 and 88 in 2000.

As with heroin, some people can simply quit OxyContin cold turkey. But for
unshakable addictions, some treatment professionals say methadone is the
best remedy.

Methadone has long been used as a treatment for heroin addiction. As a
synthetic opiate, methadone acts as a replacement drug, staving off the
painful withdrawal symptoms of physical dependency.

Though the majority of people who are in methadone treatment are still
former heroin addicts, the numbers are growing for oxycodone users.

"One-third of our new admissions have had experience with OxyContin," said
Eugene Caine, a staff physician at Parkside Recovery, run by the nonprofit
Northwestern Human Services.

"They are younger. They are white," Caine said.

At Discovery House, a methadone clinic in Hatboro, Montgomery County,
demand for methadone treatment for oxycodone addiction is helping to fuel
an expansion.

"We started out in one building. Now we're in two buildings, and we're in
the process of getting a third," said program director Mark Besden.

At least half of the last 30 admissions were for treatment of oxycodone
addiction, he said.

Glinka, now 20, must take his methadone every day. Until he is ready to be
weaned of the drug, he needs a new dose every 24 hours.

To get from his home in the Holmesburg section of Northeast Philadelphia to
Parkside, he rides a bus, then the El, and then another bus. Each one-way
trip takes about two hours.

At Parkside, Glinka drinks a small cup of liquid - his prescribed dose of
methadone, which is given to him through a window in a booth. He says the
taste reminds him of when he was high on OxyContin.

But the methadone doesn't get him high. It gets him through the day - and
it has brought stability to a life once consumed by OxyContin chaos.

"Every day, you wake up and say, 'OK, where are we going to get our Oxys
today?' " Glinka recalled.

At $1 a milligram on the street, an 80-mg tablet can cost $80. Some users
switch from OxyContin to heroin, which is cheaper and more available.

When Glinka ran out of money, he said, he stole from his family. And when
he had money, but not enough for OxyContin, he tried heroin.

"I liked the OxyContin high better," he said. "I was really scared to shoot
it, so I stuck to taking pills."

A baby-faced, stocky young man with close-cropped blond hair and an
outgoing personality, Glinka tried marijuana when he was 12. He later got
into Xanax and Percocet, and then moved on to OxyContin.

He got his first OxyContin tablet from a friend whose father had a
prescription.

"I didn't know by doing it every day that it would come to my needing it
every day."

When he didn't have money to sustain his habit, he suffered painful
withdrawal. He described it as similar to having the flu, but 10 times worse.

He eventually put himself into a detox program. That didn't work.

Then he put himself into another drug-treatment program and got his first
doses of methadone. It worked so well he switched to Parkside last year.

Bonnie is stepping down her methadone doses and hopes to be off the drug soon.

She's been going to Parkside for 21 months.

"I seriously thought it would be like three or four months," she said. "I
thought it would be six months tops. I had no idea. People told me, but I
just didn't believe them."

She knew nothing about OxyContin when she first tried it.

"People thought it was a party thing," she said. "I didn't realize I could
get physically addicted."

She did other drugs, but OxyContin was her favorite.

"I just remember feeling so good, happy, talkative, so friendly," she said.
"It took me a long time to realize I was hooked."

Bonnie got pregnant and, in a bout of withdrawal, went into premature
labor. A hospital doctor gave her OxyContin to stop the labor. She was then
advised to get into a methadone program or her baby would die.

She was scared of getting stuck taking methadone for the rest of her life,
but she feared for her unborn son. She entered Parkside in June 2001, a
month before she gave birth.

The methadone "helped a lot, I guess, in the fact that my son was born
healthy," she said.

Bonnie said she'd like to go to college to study photography.

The methadone "gave me time to get my mind straight."