Fair enough, FUBAR, but you asked for it and so be it. I didn't start the thread and tried killing it but here goes.
The possibility of acquiring methadone from the less fortunate has been on my mind lately what with the national lock-down corona-phobia panic where all the marginal recipients of financial assistance were left in the lurch in last week's big stimulus bill which will give me a one-time and all the employed and retired $1200 but the truly poor people on SSI who didn't work for 40 quarters may have to file a simple one-page 1040-EZ tax return to get the $1200 and that's all the homeless people who never file taxes. It's gonna be very hard times because there's a very large off-the-books economy being hit very hard and there's gonna be a huge wave of anger when they hear about the $600/week windfall for apparently everyone applying for unemployment insurance, which is $600 in addition to a sliding scale usually about 3/4 of their weekly wage with a cap, averaging $385/week for the entire country, so the average recipient would see their UI check increase from $385 to $985, giving low and medium-wage-earners tremendous incentive to stay home from work and get way more money for a full four months than they'd get from working, Anyone can just say they have sniffles or cough and they don't want to scare colleagues of public to get a huge windfall for not working. This is gonna trigger a huge increase in crime.
Anyway, my old clinic is close by just a 20-minute car ride or bike ride away. And it's a place I know well because I attended for four years. Now in the US clinic system put in federal regulations 50 years ago we have a take-home earning schedule where after every 90 days of good behavior a person can request advance to the next level of takehomes, which culminates usually at 27 bottles but some clinics go by monthly to give a person the next month minus one. So a person just starting out or a person with a spotty record of compliance attends the clinic six days a week, because it's closed on Sunday, so everyone there gets a take-home bottle on Saturday. If Monday is a federal holiday then everyone going into the clinic on Saturday will be coming out with two bottles. They have a rule requiring a metal lock box and the dispensing nurse is supposed to be on guard for "cheeking" to hold on to the "spit" because the intact takehome bottle is worth much more and everyone gets one every week and also there's no place to do it in private because they won't let you use the bathroom unless you can ask staff to unlock the door for you. In four years there was only one dispensing nurse who checked for cheeking and she was gone after two weeks because ironically she somehow managed to steal several (?) full liter bottles of the Methadose syrup, and the reason we all found out was the clinic running out of methadone and so it was not something they could hide from us and while they probably had to report the theft to DEA it seemed local police weren't informed.
OK, when I was attending there it was just 90 days til I earned my first takehome and then after each 90 days my counselor brought me up at the weekly staff meeting where anyone else could dispute my eligibility for behavioral or other issues but this was always approved and after 15 months of treatment I was in the catbird seat of going only biweekly and receiving 13 takehome bottles. Now in retrospect I should have stayed at the 6 bottles given every week with some closer attention and monitoring and social interactions there and well, let's just say that I found myself back to square one and attending clinic six days a week and getting only the Sunday and holiday takehomes, which are labeled with the person's name and the dose and a tamper seal inside. Nobody spits into their bottle on the way out. Not ever. It'd be a clear violation for a person to open their takehome bottle at the clinic or nearby because that's not to be opened until the next day.
Now another thing is the difference between Saturday and weekday staffing and rules. Saturday limited staffing only with no counselors there means there's nobody to keep an eye on the parking lot and loitering, so a patient could be standing on the sidewalk across the street holding their metal box and just "waiting for a ride" as long as it takes. With earned takehomes, more than the one or two given everyone, a patient can choose which day of the week to receive them, and the least favored days were Saturdays because that'd be like slumming with people who failed their UAs and also Mondays because that's the day they do the most intakes and it's generally the hairiest and confused inside the clinic. Once you have a certain day of the week and only attend that day you can move it earlier, but you can't move it later, so the people with substantial takehomes, like 6, 13, or 27 tended to be mostly on Wednesday, and Wednesday would be the day that a person getting 4 takehomes would visit and get bottles for Th, Fr, Sat, Sun. Those are the people who you want to meet and get their phone number; if they want to earn some extra income they can make do with the 3/4 of their clinic dose by having it raised so it's a bit higher than they really need. Both Mondays and Tuesdays are very hairy and confused because that's when they're doing intakes and doing the initial dosing which keeps the counselors very busy and a person getting say with the maximum 27 bottles has to see their counselor at that visit so they're not gonna want to do that on a Monday or Tuesday, and in the other direction Saturday doesn't have any counselors there.
Going rate in recent years has stayed very close to 20 cents/mg. When people were desperate they could usually count on at least ten cents/mg. Average dose was running around 100 mg with median around 80 mg. Doses can go as high as 200 mg.
If you're gonna go hang out around a methadone clinic, say to interview the patients and do sociological research, my advice is to bring cigarettes and be smoking a cig. I get kreteks in the mail from Indonesia and if someone is especially helpful I'll give them whatever's left in the pack if they can handle a strong cigarette. It's not for everyone but if say a person has years of experience at a particular clinic and is recognized as a former patient by some of the long-timers, knows the drill, etc., well, what can I say.
