Drug frees addict from methadone

Tanya Clapp, 37, and a native of Eddington, started using methadone six years ago when she lived in Florida – not to manage her entrenched narcotic addiction, but to feed it.

“I met a girl who was shooting coke while she was on methadone; it worked like a speedball [an injectable cocktail of cocaine and heroin],” Clapp recalled in a recent conversation. To get the intense high her new acquaintance was boasting of, she enrolled at a methadone clinic, shooting cocaine and other drugs on top of her daily “therapeutic” oral dose.

Clapp was playing a deadly game. “I was getting sicker and sicker all the time,” she said. “I’d get strung out so bad, and I didn’t have any money.”

Eventually, she moved back to Maine, where her two young daughters were living with their father. She enrolled at a methadone clinic here to assure herself a steady supply of the narcotic, and she kept using other drugs recreationally. “I was still shooting coke, and [the clinic] kept threatening to throw me out, but they never did,” she said. She also mixed the anti-anxiety drug Xanax with her methadone, a particularly deadly combination.

Her older daughter would have nothing to do with her, but the younger girl lived with her some of the time. “She would walk into the room and there would be three or four of us sitting around shooting up,” Clapp said. “I really didn’t care at the time. All I could care about was the drugs.”

All told, Clapp got daily doses of methadone for five years. Somewhere along the line she decided she really did want to get clean. She stopped using other drugs, mostly, and made a real effort to turn her life around, using the methadone to control her cravings. But it wasn’t working for her.

“[At the clinic] they never asked me if I wanted to get off [methadone]; they just kept upping my dose,” she said. Her intake rose from 170 milligrams to 210 milligrams, a high dose by any standard. The drug made her sluggish and drowsy, and sometimes she hallucinated.

“I was right out of it, all the time,” she said. “I was talking to people who weren’t there, reading things that weren’t there. My daughter was embarrassed to bring anyone over because I’d just be sitting on the couch drooling. … Everyone who knew me told me I needed to get off it.”

A doctor at the clinic finally told her about Suboxone and put her in touch with one of the few area physicians who could prescribe it. He was willing to treat her, but first she had to get the methadone out of her system or the new drug would make her violently ill. She spent two weeks weaning steeply off her high dose. “It was like the worst flu of my life,” she said, trying to describe how terrible she felt. “It was tough to get through, but I was determined not to go back to the methadone.”

That was almost a year ago, and Clapp has been clean ever since, a huge achievement for a woman who has been drinking and using drugs since she was 14. The Suboxone she takes has eliminated her cravings and allowed her to make use of the regular counseling sessions she attends as a condition of her treatment.

For the first time she can remember, Clapp said, “I’m aware of everything around me. I know what’s going on. I can enjoy sitting outside on a sunny day or going to a movie. I take one day at a time, and I’m beginning to feel good about my life.”

Her younger daughter, now 16, has come to live with her full time, and together they are trying to repair the tattered remnants of their relationship. “It’s coming back,” Clapp said, with a mother’s eternal optimism. “She knows she can talk to me now, and I’ll listen and not judge.”

For the first time she can remember, Clapp said, “I’m aware of everything around me. I know what’s going on. I can enjoy sitting outside on a sunny day or going to a movie. I take one day at a time, and I’m beginning to feel good about my life.”