ShawneeDispatch.com

Methadone, created in a lab by Germans to replicate morphine, first gained attention in the mid-20th century as a promising cure for heroin addicts. McKnelly, a professor of psychiatry, says he had the first methadone program west of the Mississippi, founded in 1966 in affiliation with the Kansas University Medical Center.

Deaths rising

Methadone isn't just dispensed in liquid form. It can also be prescribed as tablets and diskets.

Methadone-related poisoning deaths grew 389 percent between 1999 and 2004, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, from 786 to 3,849. At the same time, heroin deaths declined slightly.

Recent years have seen a shift from methadone as an addiction-treatment drug to an analgesic, or painkiller, prescribed by doctors.

"We need to better determine why the use of prescription opioids has increased so markedly over the course of the last several years, especially the prescription of methadone as an analgesic," the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence said in a 2005 statement. "It would appear that physicians are prescribing methadone as an analgesic to an increasing number of patients without providing appropriate therapeutic safeguards."

Methadone is just one of a number of opiates on the rise. Oxycodone prescriptions grew 50 percent between 1999 and 2002, and morphine prescriptions grew 60 percent, according to a study cited in January's Journal of the American Medical Association. The single-most prescribed drug nationwide is the painkiller hydrocodone, with more than 100 million prescriptions in 2005.

Why such an increase? The American Medical Association article attributed it to a growing emphasis on treatment of pain, a trend that's only likely to increase in coming years as the population ages and more people suffer from arthritis, cancer and back pain.

"This increase in legitimate use of these medications has paralleled ... a rise in abuse of these drugs," the article said.

McKnelly and his staff members say they've seen more patients in recent years who come into the clinic hooked, not on heroin, but on prescription pills. McKnelly calls OxyContin -- which is often crushed into powder and snorted to bypass its time-release feature -- "the worst thing in the world."