Methadone Maintenance Treatment Remains Controversial Even After 23 Years of Experience

THE MELROSE CLINIC, located on the tenth floor of a high-rise building in New York City's South Bronx, is an anomaly in the methadone maintenance treatment world. It is a clean, bright facility that looks "medical," like an environment conducive to recovery. One of the patients on hand is a young Hispanic woman, a married mother of three. She is petite, almost frail. Like all methadone patients, once a day she downs a small cup of orange drink containing a dissolved diskette of methadone hydrochloride—a synthetic painkiller developed in Germany during World War II—so that she won't have to plunge a needle in her arm. Exchanging Addictions? There are people who would say that she has simply exchanged addictions, from illegal heroin to sanctioned methadone, from a needle to a pill. The amount of methadone that patients usually receive at a clinic would stupefy even many addicts. In a person