More than 10,000 receive the heroin substitute, but an alternative medication is available.
The first thing Philip (43) does each morning after waking up is to reach for a plastic bottle with green liquid.
“It’s sweet, a bit like cough medicine,” he says. “I take it to feel normal. If I didn’t take this, it would be horrible ... You get withdrawals. It’s horrible. The body just shuts down.”
He takes a 90ml dose of methadone, seven mornings a week. Philip is trusted enough to get “take aways” from his pharmacy twice a week, instead of queuing up at a drugs clinic.
It doesn’t make him high, he says. The people you see spaced-out, wandering across the traffic? They’re the ones, he says, taking it with booze or benzodiazepines.
It’s 15 years since he was first prescribed a maintenance dose of methadone to help treat his addition to heroin. He never thought, more than decade and a half later, he’d still be on the drug.
Source: Carl O'Brien, The Irish Times, 28/09/15
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