A couple who announced intentions to open a methadone clinic in Dade County at last week’s county commission meeting were questioned sharply by the commissioners, but at least initially there seemed no legal barrier to keep them from proceeding as planned.

Scott and Melissa Hancock had reserved a spot on the commissioners’ Feb. 3 work session agenda to discuss their proposed venture, Tri-State Drug Treatment, and seemed especially interested in consulting the county attorney, Robin Rogers, about potential impediments to their plan.

“To the best of our knowledge, there’s no ordinances or laws that will keep you from doing that,” said Ms. Hancock of their project.

“I’m not aware of a local ordinance that would apply,” agreed Mr. Rogers. He said the county had a formal long-range plan in effect that had in some instances interfered with businesses’ ability to locate in Dade, but he offered no opinion on whether that plan would impact a methadone facility. He said that health regulations might apply, and he promised to check into the matter further and to keep the commission apprised of what he found.

But Natalie Walls, environmental health specialist at the Dade County Health Department, said that presumably a methadone clinic would be a private entity and that as far as she knew her department would have no role in regulating it. “I have no dog in that fight at all,” she said.

Environmental Health supervisor Shaun Brand said much the same, explaining that the Health Department could only get involved if the entity required a food service permit or had some septic or sewer issue.

The Hancocks called their proposed clinic an “opiate treatment facility.”

“It is referred to as methadone but that word scares people, because when they hear methadone they automatically think ‘meth,’” said Ms. Hancock. “It has nothing to do with methamphetamine.”

She and her husband explained that their prospective facility would treat abusers of such drugs as Oxycontin and hydrocodone as well as heroin, the substance with which methadone has often been associated in the past. “A lot of people out here are buying prescription drugs on the street, and they don’t realize there is help out there,” said Mr. Hancock. “That’s what this is for, to help people who have problems with prescription pain pills.”

Ms. Hancock said she was a certified addiction specialist with nine years’ experience in methadone treatment. She said that methadone is a class-2 narcotic that is used to wean users off more destructive drugs.

“You get them on a stable dose of methadone and then you can lower that dose at a slow rate to where they don’t experience withdrawal symptoms,”
she said.

She said demand for such facilities was considerable: the clinics she’d worked for in Chattanooga and Fort Oglethorpe treated hundreds of patients and both had waiting lists, with patients traveling from neighboring states for treatment.

District 4 Commissioner Peter Cervelli asked her how many patients from Dade County used these facilities. “Is Sand Mountain part of Dade County?” she replied. “We have a lot coming from Sand Mountain.”

Interviewed later, she said that some of her clinic’s patrons would likely come from Dade but many would also come from further afield. “I can’t tell you they’re not going to come from outside because they probably will,” she said.

A proposed methadone clinic in Trenton in 1992 met with emotional rejection from local citizens on the basis it would bring out-of-town drug users, and an accompanying rise in crime, to the town.

But Mr. Hancock said a methadone clinic would actually lower the incidence of crime in the area.

The Hancocks said they have not yet chosen a site yet but are considering the north end of the county. “We know a lot of people don’t want this right next door to their grocery store or anything like that, so we’re leaning toward Wildwood,” said Ms. Hancock.

She said the clinic would have a physician, nurses and counselors on site. “We would hope to get people from this area, of course, to fill those positions” and would help users with other medical problems they might have let go for years as they struggled under their addiction.

Ms. Hancock said that methadone treatment is never court-ordered but strictly voluntary and privately paid for. “So these people sincerely want the help or they wouldn’t be there,” she said.

To Commissioner Cervelli’s question about whether methadone was also a lifelong addiction, she said that while a 20-year user might well have to stay on methadone for the rest of his life, the prognosis for living completely drug-free was better for those who had not been addicted as long. She said that in any case methadone treatment costs about $12 a day as opposed to the $30,000 and upwards many addicts must come up with yearly to feed their habit, does not destroy their vital organs and does not have to be obtained illegally.

Mr. Rogers at press time said he had done nothing further to explore the legal question of a methadone facility in the county.

Since it was muscular objection from the Dade Sheriff’s Department that in 1992 initiated popular opposition to the methadone project proposed then, current Sheriff Patrick Cannon was also contacted for his opinion on the current project, but he did not choose to comment.

Robin Ford Wallace
robinfordwallace@tvn.net