Methadone treatment has become increasingly popular in Ontario. In 2007 there were 17,690 methadone patients in the province, according to the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons.So what will the number be in 2011?
In 2009 that number had risen to 25,396, and in 2010 it is expected to rise to close to 28,000.
Now for my opinion:
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that by 2012 Ontario will have about thirty-five thousand methadone addicts/patients.
And whatever increase might occur in London, the existing clinics are going to have to deal with - at least for a year ( as a ban against building Methadone clinics has recently passed).
Of course, regular pharmacies can still be built which distribute the drugs many addicts get hooked on - so the junkies who aren't interested in going into recovery shouldn't have to worry about being affected by increased demand. If there was a ban on building regular pharmacies such as those where people get morphine, oxycontin, valium, speed, needles, along with insulin and the like people would whine about human rights.
Any debate about that would surely have more than one on-his-way-out councilor standing against banning the building of those pharmacies - people have to get their drugs, right?
I'd write a sternly worded letter to the mayor if they ever tried to ban the building of the kind of pharmacy that decent people such as myself use.
Something about this is strange though isn't it. A man can take painkillers for an injury and so long as they are prescribed people don't seem to care. But once that man gets prescribed methadone because he wants to get his life back on track he becomes one of those people and he just cannot expect to have the same access to his medication as he did before Now such a man can expect to wait in a long line with a bunch of criminal addicts, which I'm sure is beneficial to his recovery. Right?
I've seen the line-ups at these clinics and frankly they look degrading to the people in them. I cannot imagine any other kind of pharmacy letting such a thing occur, but I suppose these clinics have a large population of addicts to deal with. More clinics would reduce these degrading lines - which if past trends are anything to go by - are only going to get longer. Plus the longer the lines are, the more unsightly I find them.
And if the lines are so big that they are literally wrapping around the outside of the clinics, then that increases the exposure of the neighborhood to these addicts and decreases the ability of clinic staff to monitor the patients, and catching them if they try to deal drugs. The clinics ban those who the catch buying or selling drugs, but still the activity does occur.
Isn't decreasing exposure one of the goals of banning these clinics? If there were sufficient numbers of clinics, the addicts could be hidden from view inside the building, and maybe the places wouldn't look the way they do. If their weren't addicts waiting around outside, alot of these places would look like normal pharmacies.
Now addicts will be more visible and have to hang around even longer at the existing clinics. As far as the drug dealers are concerned this means a greater concentration of customers will be present for greater periods of time.
Consider also that drug dealers probably don't like methadone clinics, as they 'steal' potential customers away. Now the illegal opiate dealer's primary competition has been weakened for a year. Frustratingly, this weakening of the competition will probably result in a minor rise in profits for our prohibition-ducking criminal underclass.
That's just the way it is.
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