Methadone’s therapeutic benefits were an accidental discovery. Initially, the compound was synthesized in Nazi Germany as a substitute for morphine. Like many European nations at the time, Germany sourced much of its raw pharmaceutical opium from Turkey. Research for synthetic analgesics had already begun in Germany in the 1880s, but Hitler’s desire to achieve an economically independent, industrial state intensified these efforts. Hitler also anticipated potential opium shortages due to Allied blockades during the upcoming war. Consequently, scientists at the pharmaceutical laboratories of the I.G. Farbenkonzern, a subsidiary of the important chemical conglomerate Farbwerke Hoechst in Frankfurt, were diligently searching for synthetic opioids to serve both the military and civilian populations.
In 1939, two Hoechst scientists named Bockmühl and Ehrhart synthesized a number of compounds, one of which was 2-dimethylamino-4,4-diphenylheptanon-(5), which they numbered Va 10820, patented and codenamed Amidon. Hoechst produced very limited quantities of Amidon, and it was never used during WWII to treat patients in either military hospitals or casualty clearing stations. Instead, WWII ended, and Allied forces seized all German research records, patents, and trade names. The US Department of Commerce confiscated the Farbwerke Hoechst’s documents, gave them to the US Department of State’s Technical Industrial Committee for review, and then brought them to the United States. Since the German patent rights were no longer protected, any pharmaceutical company interested in producing Va 10820 could purchase the rights to the formula. The US government sold the rights for one dollar.
In 1946, researchers at the US Public Health’s Narcotic Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky used Va 10820 to alleviate heroin withdrawal symptoms while slowly tapering patients from the new drug over a period of one week to ten days. Because the German opioid was only considered a strong analgesic, it never received further testing beyond this limited clinical use. It was only in 1964 that two New York researchers began utilizing methadone’s potential for long-term opioid replacement therapy.
In 1947, the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association gave Va 10820 the generic name “methadone.” In that same year, the FDA approved commercial production, and the American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly became the first company to manufacture it in the US. Lilly registered their product under the trade name Dolophine, a word derived from the Latin dolor, meaning pain, and finis, meaning end. It was common practice to give analgesics the suffixes -dol or -phine, not only in English but in German, French, and other languages. Companies in other countries soon followed suit, marketing the narcotic under innumerable trademarked names ranging from Butalgin to Ketalgin to Westadone.
As the news of methadone’s use in the Lexington Narcotic Hospital spread, other researchers and doctors started using it as a form of long-term opioid replacement therapy. People opened up clinics in New York City in the 1970s, and they soon multiplied around the City and beyond.
In order to dispense medicine, most modern clinics have firm rules. CODA required that new or early-stage patients had to attend monthly one-on-one meetings with a counselor, attend the weekly “Stabilization” support group, and leave random urine samples, or UAs. If you left dirty UAs, missed too many groups, or ditched too many one-on-ones, nurses withheld your dose for noncompliance. The fear of withdrawal is a powerful motivator, detox the ultimate ultimatum, but CODA offered many incentives for sobriety too. The longer patients stayed clean, the more freedoms the clinic would afford us. If I abstained, as I had been, for one full year, I’d soon have monthly rather than weekly urinalysis, graduate from the weekly group to the monthly “Maintenance Group,” and I’d be picking up two weeks’ worth of take-out doses at a special designated time well before the clinic’s long line formed. Not a bad deal. I scheduled my first group meeting not long after I arrived in Portland; it met once a week at the clinic on my day off work. First, CODA assigned me a counselor.
Her name was Francine. She was a tall, heavyset woman with sagging sail-fish arms, and a voice like melted chocolate. Her small office’s window overlooked the clinic’s parking lot. Framed family photos lined her desk. She patted my shoulder the first time I came in. I liked her immediately.
Francine sat straight in her chair, studying me as we spoke. Without spending too much time on small talk she said, “So, why did you use heroin?” It wasn’t the worst question she could have asked, but it was one of them.
I stared at the compacted carpet fibers and tried to collect my thoughts. “Why did I use?” I figured my reasons were the same as most recovering addicts’—heroin made me feel good, or at least feel better than I felt on my own. I never suffered some childhood trauma that I wanted to run from, but on it, I told Francine, I was calmer, kinder. I worried about nothing and nothing mattered other than each ravishing glacial moment. Like William Burroughs in his book Junkie, I could happily stare at my toe for hours, though I was more likely to fall asleep in various places while reading. And I was lazy.
I wasn’t thrilled to admit the way heroin made me feel. It seemed the sort of information that enticed young people to try the drug. But saying otherwise would have been as disingenuous as saying I hadn’t enjoyed the high during my first months of abuse. “Humans are pretty simple creatures in one respect,” I said. “We avoid discomfort and pursue pleasure. We do what feels best.” Having studied ecology and philosophy as an undergraduate, my understanding of human behavior—my entire world view—was rooted in the fundamentals of life science and moral theory. “But it’s that little—” I stopped to run my hand across my head. I looked up. “I’m sorry. It’s really weird talking like this.” I drew a deep breath and apologized for the tears I was struggling to hold back. “But, you know, we’re really complicated too, right?”
She nodded.
“I used for a ton of different reasons later,” I said. “Tons.”
When she asked if my friends or family knew I was in a program, I said that they didn’t even know I’d had a heroin problem. “You’re the first person I have ever spoken to in such detail,” I said.
I told Francine a bit about Kari, described our misguided engagement and how I’d secretly used, and I mentioned how the three friends with whom I’d first tried heroin five years earlier had eventually developed an opiate habit. After years of over-drinking, one bottomed out with heroin and later joined AA. One developed a drinking problem and a brief, closet dependence on prescription pain pills, a habit that I heard about later and that he still refused to discuss. Like me, another became a junkie who eventually got on a methadone program. He was the ideal person with which to discuss my problems, yet I’d never broached the subject. Francine said some patients found divulging their secrets therapeutic, but I feared full disclosure would have the opposite effect: that people would grow suspicious of me, retract whatever trust they’d afforded, and then sever our relationship. Even though I’d only snorted heroin for one year, I feared that wouldn’t matter to most people. A junkie was a junkie, and once one always one. Also, I didn’t want to admit to my past because my lying and sneaking and secrecy shamed me. I wanted people in Portland to embrace me for my other traits, not judge me solely on my weaknesses. I knew it was an idealistic, unrealistic approach, but I intended to start completely from scratch here: a new life affixed to no past other than the good parts. She nodded. She didn’t have to outwardly acknowledge the outlandish futility of such thinking for me to recognize it. “Well, if you ever feel it’s time,” she said, “that’s a topic you might explore in group.”
Francine adjusted herself in the chair. “So, why didn’t you tell Kari any of this?” Now that was the worst question.
After abandoning my mixed drug recovery group in Tucson, I managed a stint of unsupervised sobriety. As if to add meaning to the ritual of my resistance, I marked my sober days on a wall calendar, starting from zero after my little relapse with weed at a party in Phoenix. I also started adding notes about where Kari and I went on dates. We ate at rest
aurants and hung out at coffee shops. Sometimes I dragged her to a bookstore and browsed the nature shelves. Other times she took me to her girlfriends’ apartments to swim in their pool. Then, on a whim, I drove to south Tucson and scored heroin. Even though I’d snorted and smoked it a few times back in Phoenix, I had no idea why I thought of it unprompted while watching TV alone on this particular night. I had no idea how to score either, but I’d seen enough movies to figure it out.
You find some sketchy looking guy in baggy Dickies and a tank top, someone with sunken cheeks or forearms darkened with fading tattoos, loitering either on a residential side street or in front of the liquor store housed in a corrugated aluminum warehouse topped with an external air conditioning unit, and ask if he has any chiva. When he says no but he knows where to get some, he’ll grab your passenger side car door handle and, since you’re desperate enough to let him in, direct you to some house with dried red chili garlands dangling on the porch, or busted cars parked in the yard. If you’re lucky he’ll take you to a small square cut out in the rotting wood of a backyard fence where you hand your money to an unseen stranger like at a fast food window, but that’s if cops haven’t shut that spot down, or it’s early enough that the sellers haven’t yet left the ninety-five degree heat to nod out in some air-conditioned room, and you’re rarely that lucky. So at the house the man will hold out his hand and ask, “Whadyouwant, ten? Twenty?” You’ll say you’ll pay when he comes back and he’ll say, “Can’t, man.” You’ll pause for effect, maybe raise one brow or tilt your head, a bluff that makes him worry about his own supply and utter his standard response of “I’ll be back. I’m not like that,” even though you know he is like that because, as honest a person as you once were, you’re like that too. The whites of his eyes are taut and mustard-brown, glassy like those of the goldfishes’ at the sushi restaurant you used to eat at before you started spending so much money on drugs. His dark hair and clothes stink of sweat, and as he steps into the house holding your bills, you eyeball the property, searching for views of the sides and backyard so you might see him if he sneaks out a rear door. You’ll sit in the car counting the seconds that tick by like minutes, knowing how suspicious you look, thinking it would be less obvious if you circled the block in case a cop passes by—which in this neighborhood they often do—but knowing that would only encourage this guy to rip you off. You’ll sit there stewing in guilt and his remnant BO, your engine puttering wearily like you, wondering how long it fucking takes to score one fucking balloon, wondering if he’s busy breaking pieces off your stuff, cooking it in a spoon at that very minute or has already bailed out the back door to scurry down the alley and that maybe it’s time to accept that you got duped or drove around back to see if you can spot him making his escape that punk motherfucker, though you wouldn’t know what to do if you did spot him. Then, after forever, he’ll come out of the house and slip inside the seat and ask for some of the ridiculously small piece he hands you. “That’s not a ten,” you’ll tell him, and he’ll say something like “That’s what they gave me” while scanning the street for what you hope are cops rather than an ideal time to jack you. Because he’s scary and seated three inches away, you oblige, trying to scrape as small a piece as possible from the gooey brown wafer the dealer smeared on a white plastic square of cut grocery bag, try to make it appear bigger than it actually is by spreading it with your fingernail since the recipient is sitting right there staring at your hands, reminding you that he got it for you bro, shit, come on. Then you’ll grumble and hand it to him, and he’ll grumble back with something like, “A little more,” and you’ll either talk tough with “That’s all I can spare,” or you’ll oblige because you’re a pansy ass who just wants to evade police and get home already.
When I got home I snorted a bit and was relieved to finally silence my chatterbox mind. No more worries about school, no more thoughts about careers. All the anxiety locked in my muscles drained from my body. I was pleased to be dazed again, but frightened by how much I enjoyed the feeling.
For hours I sat there in my living room chair, staring into space, thinking about nothing deeper than the color of the brown carpet fibers. That night, vivid, hallucinatory dreams filled my head, and I ditched school the next day to sniff some more. I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling, my body draped across the warm sheets. Then, in a panic, I flushed the remaining dope down the toilet. As the heroin wore off I sat in my chair and cursed myself. All that hard work, the group sessions, for what? I shouldn’t have done this.
A few weeks later I went back for more dope. I told myself it was the last time. Months passed. Kari and I spent more time at her house. We watched movies, went to dinner. The spring semester came to a close. Summer school came and went. And then, while packing for a month-long summer roadtrip, I returned to south Tucson for ten dollar’s worth—“a special occasion,” I told myself. Before I departed, Kari bought a plane ticket to meet me in Seattle. With my truck loaded with hiking gear, camping equipment, and blank journals, I drove across Arizona to Fresno, California in one day, snorting heroin the entire way, and I spent the night inside my camper in a hotel parking lot somewhere amid the San Joaquin Valley’s shimmering farm fields. Bronzed by the sun, my mind serene, I felt so good that I went to sleep thinking it was one of the greatest days of my life, rather than the beginning of the end of it.
When Kari and I returned home from our summer trip where she suffered numerous stings from a swarm of yellow-jackets, her mother made a beeline for me in the driveway. “You saved my daughter,” she said. Kari was allergic to bees. Her mother gripped me in a hug that made me both grateful and uneasy.
I said, “I got your daughter into trouble in the first place.”
She squeezed me tighter, then leaned back to look into my eyes. “You still took good care of her. Got her to the hospital and all, right?” I nodded. Kari stood beside us smiling.
With minimal thought and surplus excitement, I accepted Kari’s offer the following year to move in to her apartment. It was a tiny stucco cottage in what was once an old Tucson motor court—hardwood floors, honeycomb tile, the coolest place I’d lived at that point, and the first I’d shared with someone. We adopted a feral cat, went out for sushi, ordered vegetarian pizzas, and watched movies at home. Our home. Our relationship felt fantastic. So did heroin.
Trying to ignore the fact that I’d already decided to succumb to temptation, I poured my energy into moderating rather than terminating my intake. I scored heroin regularly in South Tucson. I hid my supplies under the seat of my truck. Kari was too trusting and uniformed to recognize the pinprick pupils, brownish eyes, and gravelly voice for what they were. I felt guilty taking advantage of her naïveté, but that didn’t stop me from doing it.
She and I went to school, did homework, and occasionally walked home from campus holding hands. Sometimes I snorted a bit in the morning, sometimes late afternoon. I even managed to binge a few days then quit for a few to avoid physical dependence. That didn’t work for long.
The first withdrawal was worse than I imagined. Symptoms started while I sat on a bench under a row of olive trees on campus, and detox derailed my life for three days. I sweated, I shivered, my muscles ached. I spent nights curled on our living room sofa in front of a TV I was too besieged to watch. Kari entered our bedroom and emerged the next morning and I hadn’t slept a wink. Must be a flu, I told her. How could one nose run this much? I soaked in a bath while she went to class, then acted like I was reading schoolwork in there when she got home. My abdomen knotted up and my bones somehow hurt. In an attempt to lessen my misery, I went to a natural foods store and bought homeopathic tinctures of California poppy, Valerian, and Kava Kava, and I guzzled half the bottles. Nothing worked. To make sure Kari didn’t get suspicious, I spent most of the third day lying across the front seat of my air conditioned truck. I’d parked it by a tree in a desert park far from home to avoid discovery. When the fever finally lifted I felt reborn. Never again, I told myself
.
As it turned out, all that meant was never another break in my supply.
Although I regularly scored in Tucson, it took too much effort. One day a woman would be selling in an alley, the next day I’d pick someone up at a bus stop because the alley lady wasn’t there. Once a guy had me drive him to a motel, and I ended up yelling from my car window as he ran off through the desert with my money. Thankfully, years earlier, someone had introduced my friends and me to a few Phoenix dealers. They were a small group of Latino men employed by a mysterious chain of higher ups who equipped them with cell phones and a revolving fleet of what resembled retired town cars. We knew their fake first names—Carlos, John—but names didn’t matter. Once I got their numbers, I started driving the two hundred mile roundtrip to Phoenix.
You’d call from a payphone. They’d ask your location and tell you how long they’d be. Then you’d wait for up to an hour, growing increasingly anxious depending on how close you were to withdrawal. You’d wonder want to do if they didn’t show up. But then a black Lincoln Continental with tinted windows would arrive; you’d step in and cruise around the parking lot or maybe the block. The driver would open his door and grab a tiny plastic container from under the car. It was one of those vitamin bins with little dividers for pills. Its magnetized bottom stuck to the chassis so cops wouldn’t find it if they got pulled over. Balloons were color coded: one color for heroin, one for cocaine. The contents were folded within crisp squares of plastic then stuffed inside the balloon which was tied in a knot. I always sat in the back seat where the driver would talk to me while connecting with my eyes in the rearview mirror. Sometimes they’d throw in a free balloon, to be “nice.”
I stockpiled every few weeks. Then Kari and I rented movies and ate dinner on the couch. Months passed. I nodded out in class. Fell asleep while reading in bookstores.
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