Methadone Maintenance Treatment is most recognized as a harm reduction strategy for severe opiate dependence. Less understood or appreciated is its potential as a safe foundation for personal recovery from addiction.

Addiction is a lingering, recurrent and forceful compulsion to take drugs that alter mind and feeling. The compulsion of addiction is a problem deeper than mere habit. Addiction has lost connection to any reason or rationale for starting to use drugs in the first place.

Physical dependence occurs when your brain becomes used to the routine presence of an opiate drug taken every day. Chemical changes occur in the brain and require you to use an increasing amount of opiate drug to obtain effect. Withdrawal symptoms occur when the drug is stopped.

Opiate drug addiction and physical dependence fuel each other into a downward spiral of increasing use and deteriorating health.

“I can’t believe that I’m entirely responsible for my addiction.

For so long, I had no idea what I was doing to myself or why.

But I am responsible to be active in my recovery.

It is the nature of addiction that I cannot be passive.

Each day, I need to do the things necessary to protect and to grow in my recovery.”

Methadone is a drug that relieves the withdrawal symptoms of opiate dependence. It releases the opiate addicted person from the immediate and pressing physical need to take opiate drugs.

When used under medical supervision, methadone does not produce any state of intoxication. It does not alter thought or feeling and does not contribute further to the compulsion of drug addiction.