The Methadone Program—A Clever Hoax

Psychiatry’s flagship drug treatment program is methadone maintenance for heroin addicts. Just how effective has this been?

According to available literature, the program involves the use of a “medication” called methadone to rebalance brain chemistry, block the effects of heroin, and reduce craving. But there are other lesser-known facts to be examined when evaluating this program.

The goal for methadone was never a cure. According to one of the original researchers investigating methadone, “The goal is NOT abstinence, the goal is to become functional.”

Calling methadone a medication obscures the fact that it is an addictive drug; in fact, methadone is at least as addictive as heroin. Worse still, methadone withdrawal is even tougher than heroin withdrawal, with the symptoms lasting for six weeks or more. As early as 1971, it was known that babies born to methadone mothers suffered withdrawal symptoms, including convulsions.

Methadone, itself a narcotic, cannot permanently halt the craving for narcotics, nor can it eliminate the underlying reason the addict takes drugs.

As one heroin and methadone addict of 17 years testified: “I am not an advocate of methadone for the simple fact that I believe [it] helped me to prolong my active addiction. Long-term methadone use kept me trapped as a prisoner of addiction, I was tied to the clinic … if you are on methadone you do not have a ‘life,’ you are rather a slave to this drug and everyday existence depends on it. … I could not travel anywhere on vacations, nor did I want to, because I was held as a captive by this drug. …” After withdrawing from methadone, he said he “started living for the first time in my life,” and now speaks out about drug-free living.

Methadone literature warns of the drug’s life-threatening risks, including cardiac arrest, respiratory and circulatory depression, and shock. Overdose and death can occur.

Between 1982 and 1992, deaths from methadone in England increased by over 710%, from 16 deaths to 131. In New South Wales, Australia, there were 242 deaths related to methadone between 1990 and 1995.

In September 2002, after taking heroin for three weeks, Patricia Cluka’s 38-year-old husband admitted himself to a Mental Health Family Counseling Center for methadone treatment. Reacting severely to the methadone, a week later, he asked for the dosage to be reduced, but there were no doctors available at the time to adjust the dosage. Two days later, he was dead. The coroner determined the cause of death was “Acute Methadone Poisoning.”

Aside from methadone, there is also buprenorphine, a narcotic used to treat heroin addiction. Buprenorphine, like morphine, can cause respiratory depression and used on already drug dependent individuals can result in withdrawal effects.

Joseph Glenmullen of Harvard Medical School says that potent prescription drugs merely “numb feelings just as the addictive behavior once did” and won’t enable the person to successfully overcome his or her addiction.

It is interesting to recall Leshner’s statement that methadone maintenance achieves “a significant decrease in drug use and long periods of abstinence. …” In reality, all the methadone program achieves is a reduction in heroin usage, and it achieves this through an increase in methadone usage. A legal and highly addictive drug—euphemistically called a medication—has been substituted for an illegal and highly addictive drug.

The same deception is reflected in a 1998 report from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which stated that substance abuse programs were “working.” Yet the survey of less than one percent of the country’s users showed 79% of those surveyed had not reduced their illicit drug usage and 86% had not reduced their heroin usage.

In Belgium, methadone prescriptions increased tenfold between 1990 and 1994. In the Netherlands, more than 50% of methadone is dispensed through community-based private practice “methadone buses” to supply 100 or more patients with the drug. This easy access to drugs and the country’s liberalized drug policies, have made it the “place for drug traffickers to work.” A French narcotics officer described the Netherlands as “Europe’s drug supermarket.”

In 1987, NIDA launched a campaign to use “the full power of science to stop a troubling spread of heroin use among our nation’s youth.” However, by 1995, there were 500,000 heroin addicts in the United States. After billions of dollars spent on supposed drug abuse research and psychiatric treatment, the number of heroin addicts in 2000 reached 810,000.

While drug addiction can be overwhelming, it is important to know that psychiatry, its diagnoses and its drugs, are not working. Their drugs and methods only chemically mask problems and symptoms; they cannot and never will be able to solve addiction.

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