Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
There's Methadone to His Madness
DAVID LAWTON
In The Herbert Huncke Reader, 54 there's a story about the last time he went in
to see his methadone counselor. They'd done the pee test, and everything showed
up. Everything! There might have been Ecstasy in his blood, who knows? So the
methadonecounselorwasalmostbreakingdowncrying,saying,“Howcanyoudo
all this?”
Herbert was nonchalant. “This is what I've done all my life. You can't expect
me to change.”
ROBERT CAMPBELL
Once, when I ran into Huncke, he had just failed a piss test. Here he was, a
seventy-eight-year-oldman.HewasonahundredmilligramsofMethadoneaday,
enough to kill a horse. Most junkies in New York were on thirty or forty milli-
grams of methadone a day, or fifty if they were really bad off. But Huncke was on
a hundred milligrams a day. This guy had been doing junk all of his life.
So he failed a piss test. Cocaine showed up in his urine, and when you do the
coke,itcancelsouttheMethadone.SotheSocialServices,orwhoeverwasgiving
him his Methadone, decided to punish him. They started making him walk every
day all the way to the clinic to get his Methadone. This was a seventy-eight-year-
old man!
PAUL VOLMER
Dimitri asked me if I would do a favor for Huncke. Herbert Huncke had to take a
drug test every month in order to get his Methadone prescription. So Huncke had
to have clean urine, which he obviously did not. So because I was not a heroin
user, I would provide clean urine for Herbert Huncke. Once a month, he would
come to my door for urine, which I would supply for him in a mayonnaise jar. It
was quite an honor!
DAVID LAWTON
TheonethingthatHunckewaswillingtodowasmakelittletestimonialmessages,
little advertisements, for the Methadone clinic, such as, “I wouldn't be here
without the methadone program!” And yet the whole time he was on the methad-
oneprogram,heneverstoppeddoingheroin,coke,everything!Hewasincredible!
He was up in his late 70s! When he said, “Thank God for the methadone pro-
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