ABSTRACT
Methadone is a synthetic narcotic developed in Germany during World War II, and “methadone maintenance” means giving methadone to heroin addicts as a substitute for heroin. The maintenance of heroin addicts on heroin itself has been illegal in the United States since 1924, when the maintenance clinics set up under the Harrison Act of 1914 were closed down in the belief that they had generated a black-market epidemic of opiates. Forty years later it was demonstrated in New York that methadone could successfully be given to addicts in place of heroin, and that addicts who had been switched to methadone could be rehabilitated in comparatively large numbers.
