Re:My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)
by Svperstar on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @09:25AM
(#29000096)
Plenty of people get on methadone maintenance and life productive lives. This keeps them from scoring dope in the streets and fueling the drug trade. Judges have demanded people stop taking methadone and some of these people have ended up dead from an OD soon after or in jail when they were fine on methadone. Demonizing methadone programs doesn't help anything.
Re:My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)
by vintermann on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @09:54AM
(#29000393)
I'm not demonizing it, sure it can help many, but it is not a panacea. In Norway, we have a problem that people in the methadone program ask for more than they need (due to tolerance, you pretty much have to just ask them) and sell the excess to people who don't qualify for the program. In some years there have been more methadone overdoses than heroin overdoses. Even in the legal program there are overdoses.
It's writing people off as lost cases. And many addicts WANT to be written off as lost cases, because a) they already did so themselves, but feel guilty about it, an official confirmation would be nice and b) it will give them access to painkillers.
Which is why I'm very skeptical of involving doctors in the first place in free methadone programs, if such programs should exist. It shouldn't be anyone's job to validate you if you say you're a lost cause.