Sometimes the harassment methadone patients face comes from aggressive detectives looking to develop a pool of informants, as was allegedly the case for Betty and Randy. But other times the harassment is much more mundane, and comes at the hands of ordinary patrol officers. One such case happened in a small town in Georgia, and was told to me by the sponsor of the clinic. Samantha — a pseudonym — spoke to me on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation by police against her or her patients.

Recently, a few officers in town decided — seemingly on their own — to target patients leaving Samantha's clinic. They'd park in a lot adjacent to the clinic, and when patients pulled out the police would follow them, pull them over for a minor traffic violation, and often charge them with DUIs. “Mostly it was taillight, or you didn't use your blinker coming out of the parking lot, or failing to stop at a stop sign,” says Samantha. “But it was harassment.” As a result, three patients told Samantha they wanted to begin tapering as fast as possible so they could stop coming to the clinic to avoid any possible interactions with the police.

“And of course the thing about our patients is you can't get into methadone treatment without doing something illegal,” Samantha adds. “And so people are paranoid. Legitimately so. That lingers; it takes a long time to get past that.”

She eventually went to the office of the chief of police and told him what was going on. By that time, she estimates that 30 or 40 of her patients had been pulled over. Samantha says the police chief was unaware that any of his officers were engaged in the practice, and when she brought it to his attention he was stunned. He threw a well-worn pocket Constitution down on his desk, said what his officers were doing was profiling, and promised to make sure it stopped. In the two months between that meeting and when I spoke with Samantha, she hadn't had any problems. (I did not attempt to verify Samantha's story with the police chief, as it would have violated my agreement to protect her identity.)

In other cases, an officer might pull someone over not knowing they're a methadone patient, only to have a routine traffic stop escalate once they find that out. Zachary Talbott is the director of the Tennessee branch of the National Alliance for Medication Assisted Recovery, as well as an administrator for what he says is the largest online community for methadone patients and their family, currently with about 3,500 members. Through that closed Facebook group, he's able to get a good sense of how patients throughout the country are dealing with law enforcement and other issues. “That really gives me kind of a pulse. On a daily basis I go in and monitor threads, and I'll see stories across the country of police targeting and profiling methadone patients,” Talbott tells me.

Just a week before I interviewed Talbott last fall, he had gotten a call from a patient who lives in rural Tennessee and drives over an hour each way to the closest clinic, which is in Knoxville, several times a week. When this patient returned back to his home county, he got pulled over for an ordinary traffic stop. The patient had two days' worth of take-homes with him so he wouldn't have to make the trip again the following day. “He happened to have his medication bottles — totally legal — with the lid on them, all the medication still in there,” Talbott tells me. The cops saw the bottles and the patient told them it was methadone. Then, Talbott says, “things went crazy.”

“They pulled him out of the car, they search his car, they throw him in handcuffs,” Talbott says. The cops gave him a field sobriety test, and even though he passed it they arrested him anyway, on a charge of driving under the influence, ostensibly a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which protects opiate addiction as a medical disorder. He adds: “We've got a mound of medical evidence and research showing that maintenance, daily doses of methadone do not cause sedation; they don't impact the ability to operate heavy machinery.”

The cops also impounded his car, so after he posted bond he had to get a ride to the clinic or borrow a car from a friend — all from a traffic stop. “And because he's a methadone patient, he's targeted, he's thrown in jail, and given an unlawful DUI, all sorts of stuff,” Talbott says. “And most patients simply don't have the money to fight it.”

"You're doing what the federal government, the CDC, the National Institute[s] [of] Health, the medical community, and the authorities say is the best treatment you can do," Talbott says. "The most effective. Gives you the best shot at beatin' it ... You're trying to do the best by yourself, your family, your kids, trying to get back on track.” But the stigma attached to methadone endures. “Then you leave the treatment program and you're harassed and targeted by the police and treated like you just left a crack house."