Why is Methadone addiciton seen as preferable to Heroin addiction?

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7300165.stm

Addiction treatment seems a bit of a waste of time and money - just another excuse for the medical establishment to look important and soak up more tax payers money.
 
Perhaps it's because heroin can be cut with all sorts of dangerous chemicals, whereas methadone is controlled and so less likely to contain other harmful things.
 
Heroine addiction: the source is the streets and that's where the money goes. There's no regulation and no taxing or profit sharing.

Methadone addiction: the source is the pharmaceutical companies with each person having a hand in the money that goes from taxpayer to government through addict to clinic to doctor (who pays taxes) then to the drug company.

As nicorette gum is to tobacco addiction. Methadone is to Heroine addiction, it's a step towards non dependence. if they can ever get there.

And yes addiction treatment is time and resource consuming. Consider me addicted to answers.yahoo.com
 
I don't know there are both controlled substances and its illegal to get caught with either one. I guess once upon a time someone with a Ph.D. did some research with some government funding and based on their studies and finding decided that one was better than the other.
 
It's NOT. Methadone is not a street drug, per se, it's a pharaceutical used to wean people off of Heroin.
 
It's not so much that it's preferable, it's that it's supposed to help addicts get themselves off heroin - sort of the way nicotine patches and lozenges are supposed to help smokers - but very few addicts have any motivation to quit so they just sell their methadone to buy cheap, adulterated, heroin. Of course they don't get the money they need from selling the methadone and mostly steal (shoplifting or burglary) to make up the difference.

It would actually save the NHS and the police a lot of money to just prescribe heroin in the first place!!
 
£

more for the people in power, less for the crooks

to be fair though, if the country was full of methadone addicts and not smack heads, there'd be far fewer burglaries, and that benefits all of us, both through less crime and lower insurance premiums
 
I don't claim to know anything about drug treatment programs but if a person is on methadone it would hopefully reduce the addicts turning to crime to fund their heroin addiction. I heard somewhere that the average person addicted to heroin causes £160,000 of damages through crime to fund their addition.

Dealing with any addiction is difficult and over the last few decades governments and health officials have tried many methods to eradicate this problem but its a tough problem to crack.
 
The only difference is that it is made to clinical standards in a laboratory and the source is known whereas heroin is often impure and has other things added to it making it more dangerous. (I tried to find some relevance in your link but couldn't see it)
 
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