With hundreds of thousands of people abusing heroin and other opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, methadone treatment clinics are found worldwide. These clinics are intended to assist injection drug users and prescription opioid abusers from the numerous physical and mental health problems that go hand in hand with substance abuse and dependence. Although methadone has been found to be beneficial in treating heroin dependence, methadone itself has a potentially problematic addiction potential of its own. Other alternatives such as buprenorphine (Suboxone) have been developed in order to prevent such abuse from developing.

Methadone is used medicinally with management of cancer pain and other chronic pain. Indeed, physicians outside of addiction treatment facilities have very limited prescription privileges for methadone, and are generally limited to prescribing ...