Case studies in methadone use: David and Maria

David and Maria: 'It stabilises me. The last six years were the best six years of my life'
David's mother died in a fire when he was 17. By his 20s he was homeless, taking street methadone, heroin and benzodiazepine. As he fell asleep he would talk to his mother: "Mammy just let me die." He still talks to her.

Now 41, he has been prescribed methadone since he was 18. He contracted HIV in prison from a shared needle. “But I don’t feel sorry for myself. I knew you could get it. I feel sorry for the people in the 1980s who had no idea.” He went on the methadone programme initially because he was “getting sick of robbing. I know people say it’s a ‘government drug’ and they have you under control like a ball and chain on you. But I was sick of that life.”

David and his partner, Maria, have been on methadone since the 1990s and have, since 2008, been free of other drugs. They both talk about harrowing experiences in a very matter-of-fact way.

Maria discovered her abusive stepfather wasn’t her real father at the age of 15. Around the same time she was raped by a stranger. A few months later she met her real dad, who introduced her to heroin. “They were all smoking, and I asked could I have some,” she says. “It was lovely. A few hours later he injected me for the first time.”

The next day her father said, “ ‘Go into the clinic and say you’ve this problem and that problem, these pains, your nose is running,’ and before I knew it the doctor put me on methadone.”

That was 1995, and, bar a nine-month period, she’s been on methadone ever since. HIV-positive, epileptic, a methadone-prescribed polydrug user, she would for a long time spend her nights walking the streets. “I’d take any drugs not to feel normal. I didn’t want to feel normal.”

Maria and David had a son in 2004. “I didn’t realise then I had a beautiful human being inside me,” she says. They stopped all other drugs after their daughter was born. “She was HIV-free, thank God,” says David. “But she had cerebral palsy.”

Now that they’re housed, by the McVerry Trust, and their lives are less chaotic, they give talks to schoolchildren about drug use. They say that the methadone takeaways help them. “It stabilises me,” says Maria. “The last six years were the best six years of my life. And I can remember all of it.”

Gary: 'Without methadone I probably would've done stupider things to get money'
"Gary" is drinking a coffee in the sun. "I love life now," he says. He stopped taking methadone two years ago with the help of a stabilisation programme at Coolmine Therapeutic Community. It the almost 16 years he had been prescribed it he had never submitted a clean urine sample. "I used heroin and benzos the entire time."

He started taking heroin because he couldn’t behave himself on alcohol. “I thought heroin calmed me down.” He supplemented his habit by dealing and signed up to a methadone programme only “to get my ex-wife off my back. I had no intention of stopping . . . Methadone stopped me from being physically sick from heroin, but it didn’t stop me craving it.”

Eventually he was homeless, and six years ago he ended up in a coma and was hospitalised for nine months. “I was so out of it I don’t even know if I was on methadone for that time. The first thing I did when I left hospital was score heroin.”

It took the threat of prison to make him quit everything. “My lawyer told me that this time I’d get three years unless I could give clean urine samples.” At Coolmine he came off everything but methadone. Then he came off that, too. “Straight away I woke up. I got that bit of hope.” Since then he has been repairing his relationship with his children and is looking for work.

Looking back, does he think there was any point being on methadone all those years? “No point,” he says. “A waste of money and time, and that was my fault. I still wanted heroin. I just wanted my methadone, too, because I didn’t want to be sick.”

But then he reflects. “Without methadone in the background I probably would’ve done stupider things to get money. If money was an issue you always had your methadone, which would get you through till you got drugs . . . And I would probably have lost my legs if I wasn’t going into the clinic. I had a lot of abscesses and ulcers due to injecting.

“The nurses would say, ‘Come in here and let us change your bandages.’ And I’d say no, but they’d convince me and would spend three-quarters of an hour of patching me up – real emergency-room stuff. I’d have lost my legs for sure.”