WHAT IS METHADONE?
from the ‘‘liquid handcuffs’’ with open arms.
‘‘I have so much clarity,’’ Hall muses, from the lounge of his immaculately kept one-bedroom flat in Linwood. ‘‘I went through a metamorphosis, it was surreal. I didn’t feel like I was me.’’
Hall describes his upbringing as ‘‘torrid’’ – his Dad left when he was just a year old, and he experienced years of physical abuse from his mother, who ‘‘treated me like a ragdoll’’.
From the age of 11, he was brought up by his grandparents. But Hall stresses his drug use was not a direct result of his childhood, though it would be easy to draw that conclusion.
Hall is articulate. Before a response, he pauses to consider the wording of his answer. He is willing to fire pot-shots at the methadone programme, but insists it is because he values the truth, and is campaigning for the CMP to be more transparent. ‘‘That’s why they hate me,’’ he laughs.
He is an addict, but he is also a criminal – the two often go hand-in-hand, he says. Over the course of his addiction, he has served three six-month prison terms, of which he served half of each, for prescription fraud.
‘‘I was very good at stealing doctor’s pads.’’
At 17, Hall began ‘‘dabbling in temgesics’’ with friends at the weekend. Before he knew it, he was taking them every day. That was before heroin crept into his world and he began ‘‘bleeding poppies’’. Opium poppies are the source of illicit heroin.
‘‘The scene was smaller back then. We don’t get much heroin down here, that’s why Christchurch was the pill capital of New Zealand,’’ he says.
After a couple of years, however, he wanted out. He was at Work and Income sorting out a sickness benefit for ‘‘the mayhem of the drug use’’ and had a ‘‘bit of a breakdown’’. Hall was prescribed rohypnol. ‘‘I was spiralling out of control. Even at this young age, you were just like ‘this is no good’.’’
Hall describes himself as ‘‘transient’’ in the years following, moving between Australia and New Zealand, and eventually seeking help from the CMP. For six years in the early 2000s, Hall established his own plastering business. But his drug use put a stop to that.
‘‘I hooked up with a lady who was also on the ‘done. We had the odd dabble which got out of control and that snowballed and then I got kicked off the programme.
‘‘I stopped paying taxes at work, spent all my money on drugs and I was literally in bed and sending the guys to work.’’
The business folded and Hall was once again at a loss. After a year he reapplied to the CMP, and was on the programme for five years when paperwork was signed for him to move to GP care – where consumers never had to go back to clinic.
But in the midst of a particularly severe headache, Hall chose to take some leftover codeine he had after having a tooth pulled. His urine sample came back dirty, and he was back to square one. ‘‘It ripped my heart out, that did.’’ He watched as a review condemned the heavy-handed culture at the CMP, and was vocal in calling for them to change. He was watching friends die on the programme, most notable was Dave Longstaffe, 52, who died in a run-down Phillipstown flat surrounded by used syringes and stained home-bake spoons in March 2014.
An external review of the Canterbury District Health Board-run programme in 2014 documented at least four breaches of the Health and Disability Code of Consumer Rights, and highlighted a world of suicide, accidental overdose, crime and prostitution.
There has since been a change for the better at the clinic. They’ve done ‘‘amazing things’’ – Hall says, but it is ‘‘begrudging’’ praise. There are still issues. See the sidebar.
Over a year ago, Hall wrote to the CMP raising concerns about mirrors that surrounded the clinic’s toilets. He received a letter saying they would be taken down. A year on, they have been covered up but are still there.
‘‘We need to be treated like people,’’ he says.
In the last 12 months, Hall swears he has been on the straight and narrow. Since switching to suboxone he has lost 42 kilograms, and his last 10 urine samples have come back clean. But he Methadone, or opioid substitution treatment, helps wean addicts off hardcore drugs. Until July 2012, when suboxone was introduced onto the market, it was the only opioid substitution treatment available in New Zealand.
Unlike methadone, suboxone is not used for pain relief. It contains a combination of buprenorphine – an opioid medication – and naloxone – a narcotic drug that reverses the effect of other narcotic medicines.
Most recently, the drug was thrust into the headlines when it was found on 21-year-old mass murderer Dylann Roof four months before he opened fire in a South Carolina church and killed nine African Americans.
When Pharmac approved Government funding for suboxone in July 2012, it was revolutionary.
The situation at the time in New Zealand was described as ‘‘unique’’ because of the lack of heroin, and therefore heroin dependence. Instead, opioid tended to come from misuse of morphine, methadone, poppy-seed tea and ‘‘homebake’’.
Suboxone was seen as a significant upgrade from methadone for mainly its more rapid induction and because it is less sedating. It has a low overdose risk and is a good alternative for those who experience bad side effects from methadone.
It is also thought to have a milder withdrawal syndrome. does not know when, or if, he will ever rid himself of opioid reliance for good.
‘‘I just want to get off. It’s not going to be as easy as I thought [on suboxone] and I’m not sure how long it will take. Maybe my body will never be able to function without it. It’s a horrible thought.’’
Whittaker is also trying. She has now been to rehab three times. She has reconciled with her daughters, and is now the proud matriarch of a family teeming with nine grandchildren.
One of them is now expecting a first child. She also maintains a strong relationship with one of her sons, who dabbled in drug taking but is now clean. Her sister was also once an addict.
‘‘That’s my inspiration, to stay clean for my son and my grandchildren.’’
In the methadone programme, she feels as if she has been given a ‘‘raw deal’’. She asks why she has been ‘‘punished’’ by them so many times when ‘‘they are not the law’’.
In six weeks, when the bracelet comes off, she is determined to move to the West Coast, where a new life and a fresh start awaits.
But with such a long history of relapse, is there a future without opioids for Whittaker?
‘‘It’s going to be methadone or its going to be opioids,’’ she admits.
‘‘Once an addict, always an addict they say.’’