Former Methadone Clients Give You The Real Facts

Slow Road To Nowhere

The truth is, today people are dying of methadone poisoning in large numbers. Some are suffering a long and agonizing death, while others are experiencing a quick and rather painless death. Mine was almost of the slow and agonizing variety. However, dead is dead any way you choose to look at it.

My first experience with methadone came after more than 12 years of opiate addiction. Mainly heroin in the beginning, but eventually I expanded my horizons and in addition to the heroin I was consuming mass quantities of any prescription opiate medication I could beg, borrow or steal. If you were foolish enough to allow me in your home, it was only a matter of minutes before I was in your restroom going through your family's medicine cabinet looking for opiates. I became an opiate garbage can, so the progression to methadone was inevitable.

I do remember the girl working at the clinic explaining the 21-day detox plan to me, but eventual abstinence was never the plan for me. Like many heroin addicts, my plan was for the local methadone clinic to subsidize my growing opiate habit with their maintenance program, whether they knew it or not. Many of you may think since I was scamming the clinic from the get go that I probably deserved the nightmare that followed and you may be right, but the moral of my story is, that whatever brings you to a methadone clinic will be followed by a nightmare if you "keep coming back" for any length of time.

"Keep coming back" I did for six years until 1987 when I ended up on a 110mg. daily dose of methadone. By then I'd been rendered incapable of even planning a decent crime, much less carrying one out. To this day I'm not really sure why, but on July 31, 1987 I drove from Huntington Beach to South Avalon in L. A. like I had done many, many times before, but when I approach the methadone clinic something came over me. A voice in my head said "How long can you keep this up you dumb shit?" So, I turned around with out my dose, got back in the wreck I was driving, went back to Huntington Beach to the dump I was living in and before I started to get sick I rounded up all the sedatives and benzodiazepines I could get my hands on. I locked myself in my apartment and hunkered down for the worst.

I had kicked opiates at least a dozen times before (usually in jail and never voluntarily), but I had no idea what was coming. I'd heard the nightmare stories about methadone withdrawals and soon found out they were no joke. Within 24 hours the projectile vomiting began, soon followed by the projectile diarrhea. I tried to take the pills I had, but every time I tried to wash some down with only about an ounce or so of water it all came right back up. It even got to where I'd swallow them, throw them back up into the glass and try to drink them again to no avail. I wasn't able to keep even a sip of water down for the a total of 10 days.

I got so dehydrated that I began to to hallucinate. Even though I was aware the hallucinations weren't real, they were so vivid I found myself talking to them as if they were. They were better than any acid trip I ever took, I was just in no shape to enjoy them. I ached from head to toe (even my hair hurt).

The aches and pains continued for another 30 days and it was literally 90 days before I began to eat and sleep on any kind of regular basis. Six months went by before I started feeling like anything that ressembled a human being.

In my opinion, methadone maintanence does nothing but allow an opiate addict to extend his addiction. It postpones the "bottom" that heroin addicts must hit in order for them to really want abstinence, sometimes to the extent that they become so dependent on methadone they never get off it.

I've been opiate free now for over 20 years now and I still don't allow even my dentist to give me any opiates after pulling 4 impacted wisdom teeth. I'm just not willing to risk going through any of that again, plus I like my life now!

Steve D.

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