BANGOR – Though it might someday serve as many as 200 patients, Colonial Management Group’s first Maine methadone clinic will open Monday with a waiting list of 25 patients, all of them from Greater Bangor.

But because the opening will begin with an extensive intake process, which involves physicals, psychological and social examinations and orientation, it likely will be another week before actual dosing begins, Lynn Costigan, Colonial’s associate director for new development, said Monday.

“So you won’t see 25 people here on the morning of the 28th” waiting for doses of methadone, Costigan said Monday during a joint meeting of a city advisory group, Colonial Management representatives and tenants of the Maine Square Mall.

The meeting, which drew more than 20 people – though few mall tenants – took place at the clinic, which will be located in the Maine Square Mall shopping center on Hogan Road.

Costigan attributed the Penobscot County Metro Treatment Center’s small-scale startup in part to economics.

Because Colonial does not at this time accept insurance, including MaineCare, patients will pay their own way, at a cost of $13 a day, she said.

Still, that is much less costly than supporting a drug habit, which can cost up to “several hundred dollars a day,” Bill Lowenstein, associate director of the state Office of Substance Abuse and a member of the city advisory group, said.

Despite Costigan’s efforts to allay community fears through education, concerns remain.

Douglas Grant of Bangor, manager of one of the businesses located at mall, said he was not opposed to the clinic’s mission. He opposed the commercial location.

“This is a Pandora’s box,” he said, later adding, “I mean, we don’t know what to expect.”

Bangor Deputy Police Chief Peter Arno wanted to know what the clinic’s instructions to patients will be with regard to driving. He said there had been auto accidents involving patients of a methadone clinic operated at Acadia Hospital.

Costigan said that methadone was a long-acting drug and that patients typically did not feel the effects until two or three hours after taking it. She said that other substances could have caused the accidents to which Arno referred.

“And there’s no euphoric value to methadone at all,” added Donna Higgins, a Colonial regional director based in New Hampshire.

Arno remained skeptical. He said there could be adjustment periods before patients arrived at their appropriate doses and that methadone has been “diverted” to people who are not in treatment programs.

Costigan said that patients will be told about the effects of methadone as part of their orientation, but she agreed to advise them that they should arrange for others to drive them to their initial visits on the recommendation of advisory panel Chairman Susan Hawes, a city councilor.

Former Council Chairman Frank Farrington appointed the city advisory panel earlier this year to keep the lines of communication open between the city and Colonial.

The first, which opened at Acadia Hospital more than four years ago, also was controversial in the beginning.

Critics included city officials, local law enforcement officers and residents, who worried the clinic would attract junkies and drug dealers, that crime in the city would escalate and that children no longer would be safe.

That did not happen. By most accounts, the impact has been negligible, though many of the people who spoke out at a public hearing last year attributed the success of Acadia’s clinic to its hospital campus setting.

Costigan said people who want information on Colonial Management’s services can call the Bangor clinic at 973-0400 beginning next Monday.