RoanokeTimes (in publication)
January 3, 2005
Give some credit to methadone treatment. In response to your Dec. 19 news article, “Are drug deaths decreasing?”: I’d like to make an observation. I’m struck that in trying to find an answer as to why the “drug deaths” may be decreasing, there’s a glaring omission. Most of the success is attributed to law-enforcement measures. And while I’m sure that the temporary fix of incarceration of addicts did contribute to the downturn, there was no mention of methadone maintenance treatment as a possible reason. While many people mistakenly assume that MMT clinics are one of the “culprits” in the prescription medicine overdose phenomenon in Southwest Virginia (regarding the medical examiner’s statement that most “methadone-related” overdoses were caused by the pill form of the drug, which is prescribed by physicians for pain control rather than the liquid form used in MMT clinics), I suggest that the very opposite is true. That is, that many addicts who have turned their lives around through successful participation in an MMT program would have been a fatal overdose statistic themselves were it not for MMT. I realize this may be hard for some of your readers to grasp, but that’s because they rarely hear about the many success stories and only hear the “negatives” surrounding MMT.
CHARLES KITTS Co-director
Virginia Chapter National Alliance of Methadone Advocates
BLUEFIELD, Virginia