RETHINKING METHADONE

RE: "Treatment goes unfunded" and "How to save a heroin addict"; May
28-June 3 edition of Orlando Business Journal

Methadone has been used successfully for over 30 years to treat heroin
addiction in the United States. Almost 180,000 people are keeping their
lives and their sanity with this proven life-saver. It's not just
down-and-out street junkies that methadone helps, as some circles would
like you to think, it is people from right across the spectrum of American
life: Doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. all have been saved from a fate
worse than death by methadone maintenance treatment.

Incredibly, the treatment has come under attack. Volatile New York Mayor
Rudy Giuliani came out against methadone this winter and quickly had to
admit he was wrong when the overdoses started again.

Now Arizona Republican Senator and Presidential candidate John McCain has
introduced Senate Bill 423, "The Addiction-Free Treatment Act," which would
cut funding for methadone at the federal level and impose even more onerous
restrictive regulations than those under which the clinics must now labor.
Obviously the Republican strategists have done some political algebra and
come up with methadone treatment as a scapegoat and stalking horse. McCain
holds that methadone is somehow "immoral" and "Orwellian" because it
emphasizes a medication in treatment instead of the "Higher Power" to which
he obviously thinks he has exclusive access.

The methadone regulations are "in play" in Washington. Drug Czar Gen. Barry
McCaffrey is in favor of loosening the tremendous restrictions currently
keeping methadone from those whose lives it would save and letting family
physicians prescribe the medication to help heroin addicts where they are
found today: in every community. We must hope the general wins this battle;
more lives depend upon it than any of his military campaigns.

Heroin currently is flooding America. We must not allow those who now are
scrambling to cover their previous positions as Drug Hawks to demagogue
methadone for their own purposes while leaving America to grieve at
overdose funerals.

Dave Michon, Director of communications, National Alliance of Methadone
Advocates, Spooner, Wis.