To cut immediately to the chase .... I was sexually abused as a 13 year old, which led me to abuse pharmaceuticals such as Mandrax, Valium and Mogodon. Unable to cope with my situation, a family doctor prescribed me Serapax for my Valium addiction (6 of one, 1/2 a dozen of the other). Lack of self image & a blossoming addiction led into the more sinister world of prostitution & harder drugs....

Life spiralled. For 18 years I tried to kick the habit, doing whatever I could, whenever I could.....

This led into some pretty horrible territory, Cold Turkey off a $1000+ per/day habit is not a pretty sight, and as I got older, it got harder & harder. No longer did I have the sustenance to handle 10 days of agony & no sleep. Attempts at kicking led to foetal bile vomiting agony within 10 hours. The catapress kept rocketing my blood pressure whenever I'd stop taking them and Doloxine & the like kept me too dopey and made me unable to sustain the facade of being a normal employed human being.

As a user and as a member over then many years of several large and varied social groups of users, I found there was a certain stigma attached to someone being on methadone. For heroin users, methadone was seen as a NAZI invented drug which made for neat lines of mindless zombie-like methadone users.

The reasons for this stigma are many & varied. In the early days, mainly because of draconian attitudes to harm minimisation & their ruthless insistence on complete abstinence, the methodone clinics themselves were guilty of giving the drug, or more precisely the program itself, a bad name. Often users were simply thrown off the methodone program for using heroin once. This simply put people with large methodone habits back onto the streets and having to raise twice the amount of money to be normal. The regime of the program itself is fairly stigmatised. The fact that you are effectively chained to the clinic, having to go there daily to get your dosage, that holidays are hard to organise and that clinics are often unlikely to allow you to take away more than 8 days of methodone and then only with complete proof of the trip!

All of the above reasons (and more), coupled with those among us who have had bad experiences trying to kick with methodone weigh heavy on the methodone user's existence. Following is my story which outlines the many faces of prejudice that the drug user has to face.

1995, I have my own business & am working my butt off, mainly to support my rather large, but futile heroin addiction. Why futile? ... it's futile because the amount of heroin I was using daily simply made me normal! .. I never nodded off, never scratched the face or puked, or any of the other symptoms of regular use, I was simply surviving to support the addiction. Testimony to this was that the whole time I was engaged in corporate business preforming presentations in front of rooms of suited & tied business men. As I stood there in my jeans & sneakers, with a pony tail there was no visible trace of my secret affliction.

After 4 times of trying to kick it myself and failing and not having any other means of support except my own company, I couldn't afford to take any time off & had to do something serious to keep it all going!

One day while I was waiting in the rain for my dealer to arrive (9am sharp every day rain hail or shine - unlimited credit etc etc) a business associate arrived. He noticed my haggard early morning addiction ravaged aura immediately and announced that he himself was a user. After a few minutes of conversation he volunteered that he, and his partner were both on the methodone program, and had been for some time. For me this was a complete eye-opener. I had never seen a person be on methadone and be NORMAL!

By this point I was using a considerable amount of heroin and also supplementing it with prescription Morphine which was scammed from a local doctor for back pain!

I decided that I would go into the clinic & check it out. It was all strange, but friendly, the people there seemed genuinely concerned and were not afraid to tell me of my options available ...... and so it was that I signed up for the program.

I was immediately put onto 70ml/day based on my heroin use & a urine analysis. This soon became too little and over the years (now having been on the program just over 3 years) I have crept up to 160ml/day (with only myself refusing to let them take me higher).....

Peter C

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