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Methadone treatment lost in street drug bazaar

By Mark T. Reynolds, Staff Writer

Police Officer Pat Perri calls it the "Bermuda Triangle."

The drug bazaar on Bergen Street and Willis Avenue, between 148th and 149th streets, lures customers from all over, including the other boroughs, upstate New York and New Jersey. The big draw is methadone.

"Sometimes it's a mob out here," said Anthony Boya, an outreach worker for the Narco Freedom Methadone Maintenance program, a nearby drug treatment center.

As a man walked by clasping two pairs of pants, a woman sitting on a milk crate asked, "Tiene meta?" -- You got meth? "No," he replied. "I'm selling these pants to buy some."

Methadone -- or "meth" in street lingo -- is an opium-based drug that doesn't cause as much physiological damage as heroin. It is doled out at drug treatment centers, often free, to help addicts kick the habit. Medicaid pays for the treatment.

The patients are encouraged to decrease their methadone dosage gradually. Often, methadone is successful in helping total heroin withdrawal. Because it is usually free, addicts don't have to steal money to feed their habits.

But Boya speculates that about two dozen of the clinic's 700 patients sell their methadone to pay for illegal drugs. The buyers are both street addicts who aren't eligible for Medicaid and weekend heroin users who use methadone to get through the work week.

"They come from Manhattan, Yonkers," said Danny Alvarado, 42, a former heroin addict who said that methadone helped him recover. "I've seen the buyers early in the morning; the early bird gets the worm. Often they're truck drivers."

Alvarado said methadone eased his physical suffering when he stopped using heroin. Starting in September 1994, he gradually scaled down from 40 milligrams to nothing. He thought about selling it at times, but going without methadone would have been too painful. "I'm a punk for pain," he said.

But Alvarado said he knew other addicts who asked for 90 milligrams of methadone only to sell 40 milligrams for $15 on the street.

"Some people increase just so they can get more money in the street," he said. "My cousin has been doing it for six years."

Officer Perri, who works in the 40th Precinct, said that he was well aware of the black-market methadone trade, but that lookouts often prevented him from making arrests.

Perri also said that sellers who are addicts often swish the orange-flavored methadone liquid around in their mouths for a moderate effect before rebottling and selling it. Perri said that many of the people on his beat who sell methadone are infected with HIV, and that many of them have sores in their mouths that could spread the virus.

"You get some stupid kid from upstate or from Jersey who doesn't know what is going on here," he said, "they're going to get into trouble."


The Bronx Beat, April 3, 1995