Page 41 - 1

41

Chapter 3

The Behavioral Pharmacology of Methadone:
The Easy-to-Understand Version

Mark Stanford, Ph.D.

Introduction

We'd wake up, find it, no matter how long it takes to find it, and you take it. It's just,
one bag weren't enough coz we were sharing it. Then the next bag weren't enough…
then we found out it was cheaper to buy a big amount, a bigger amount like a
gram… as soon as we found that out then we would smoke as much as we could… It
got to the stage where we were just smoking ourselves silly, smoking ourselves to
death and it was killing us…" My habit got so high that we… had to sell things…
we weren't paying no bills…"

Particularly over the last decade, dramatic advances in the
neurosciences have enhanced the understanding of drug addiction. As
a result, more people are beginning to understand the nature of
addiction and are accepting it as a chronic, relapsing condition that
alters normal brain function, just as many other neurological or
psychiatric illnesses do.