April 11, 2007
 
COMMENTARY: Methadone Patients: Modern Day Lepers
 
By Craig Hammond
 
The legislature has passed - and the governor has signed - a bill making it virtually impossible for methadone treatment centers to open in new locations in West Virginia.
 
That means more than 500 Mercer County residents - addicted to opiods - will continue to get up at 4:00 am every morning and begin a fifty mile pilgrimage to either Beckley, WV or Cedar Bluff, VA to get their much needed medicine, which by the way, will cost them anywhere from ten to fifteen dollars a day. That's a bargain.
 
Most of these poor tragic souls actually have jobs. They need methadone to function. After their one-hundred-mile round trip they are ready to begin a new day without having to go to the street and purchase opiod drugs like morphine, codeine, demerol, and oxycodone from the very expensive - and very unsafe - black market.
 
Some of these addicts were recreational drug users, but many others are addicts because of injuries or botched surgeries that required massive doses of pain medicine. The leadership of the Princeton / Mercer County Chamber of Commerce and our Mercer County legislative delegation fought very hard for the law that would stop a methadone clinic from opening in Mercer County. Thanks to them, our 500 addicts must now be exiled.
 
Our legislators and the folks at the Princeton Chamber will tell you they oppose methadone clinics because of a few highly publicized fatal methadone overdoses in Logan and Charleston. All of these unfortunate incidents happened because the patient did not follow instructions or mixed methadone with other toxic chemicals. Sure, methadone has risks. Sure, methadone is replacing one addiction for another. But it beats the alternative.
 
The one big (and I mean big) reason I support methadone treatment is because the drug must be taken orally. Presently, Mercer County leads the state in the number of hepatitis C patients - most of whom got their disease from intravenous drug use. If the Chamber of Commerce thinks we have a problem now, just wait five or seven years from now when these Hep C victims develop liver failure and liver cancer on a scale unseen in our region. Now that's a problem. Methadone treatment will help prevent new cases of Hepatitis C.
 
The business community and our legislators list a few other (and very weak) reasons for opposing a methadone clinic in Mercer County. Put as you talk to them one-on-one, face-to-face, and person-to-person, and begin to peel back the layers of their excuses, it becomes painfully clear that they just don't want them - and any new addicts - inside the the city gates. They want them out of their sight. They want them to go away. These addicts are modern day lepers. What would Jesus do?