PAIN-KILLERS ARE ADDICTIVE.

Their swimmy-headed, sedative, bye-bye-reality effects can be incredibly
enticing.

While I hope to never again have all four of my impacted wisdom teeth sawed
and torn from my gums, my post-op experience, floating high on a misty
cloud of soothing Percocet, was by far one of the nicest disconnections
I've ever had. Pain-killers beg to be abused.

It should come as a surprise to exactly no one, then, that methadone, an
old-school but until recently underused pain-killer that is also useful in
negating the undesirables of heroin withdrawal, has made its way to the
street, hustled into the hands of non-prescription patients.

Why does this news warrant center-front-page coverage in The New York Times
(Sunday, Feb. 9, headlines screaming, "Methadone, Once the Way Out,
Suddenly Grows as a Killer Drug")? I can see just two immediate,
potentially arguable justifications wedged between less logical reasoning
in the Times article.

1. Methadone is supposed to be a miracle drug, supposed to heal the souls
(or at least the aching heads and churning stomachs) of die-hard heroin
addicts. Get a little methadone in the junkies' systems and anything is
possible: People who have spent years fixated on how to steal the most the
fastest to get the best rock the soonest suddenly care about and bother
with gainful employment, neglected families, the colors of the sunset.
Methadone successfully fixes these people; it can't possibly be a bad
thing. Except that the fixing consists of swapping addictions. The reason
methadone so triumphantly tramples heroin addictions is it replaces them.
It may be a slightly more functional addictive phase, but junkies who turn
to methadone to stop shooting up never really stop using.

They take methadone for the rest of their days or risk unsavory relapse.

2. Methadone is purportedly a slow-release pain-killer, which is why it
works to counteract heroin withdrawal and why it is thought to be not
particularly addictive -- there's no quick fix, no sudden, overwhelming
high. There's no way it could have become a street drug, no reason people
would find it desirable.

When people first start buying drugs, though, in their naivete, it isn't
likely they're consulting Merck to get a quick precis of the particular
drug's effects.

Guy says, "Got some good shit, thirty bucks a bag, get you real high,"
holds up a bag filled with a hundred times the powder of a thirty-dollar
bag of smack and you're itching for a fix, so it's likely you'll buy it and
try it and, when you don't feel the killer high, you'll try a little more,
little more, trying to fly until you're crashing on the cement, overdosing,
dead. This is what's happening all over the country, thanks to methadone.

The drug is addictive because it's a serious sedative; it staves off pain,
physical and otherwise.

The drug is scary because its effects dawdle, and high-seekers,
predominantly adolescents who aren't up on their pharmacology and are
hoping for a little quicker kick, do it till they die.

So the FDA's in a bind because it has so adamantly promoted methadone, the
miracle dope-fiend cure, and it turns out to be not only easily abused, but
fatally so. And the government can't yank it from the market, because the
methadone fiends, lacking the pills, would start stealing to shoot again,
and there's no better quick-fix rehab plan for junkie parasites.

And all the Men in Charge have to say is: "It's kind of a puzzle.

People should be somewhat sophisticated about methadone." Seems like the
simple solution to a puzzle now unnecessarily scrambled is to rethink this
ludicrous line of illogic and reevaluate the true nature and efficacy of
our national rehab programs.