Whenever Dr. Phil Leveque speaks on Salem-News, I make sure to listen! His latest article points out that methadone kills thousands of people and Marijuana hasn't killed anyone, here's a particularly good snip from the story:

[...]This was pretty scary to me, I had 5,000 patients on marijuana and I just didn't know I was harming them.

Now let's go to Methadone. This drug is highly recommended and prescribed to get morphine, oxycontin and heroin drug addicts off these drugs. It must be safe and good for those druggies because the FDA and the rest of the U.S. government bozos say it is good and safe. Whoa, there must be another side to this story.

Last week I picked up an interesting medical journal, The Ladies Home Journal, with an article about Methadone with information from the U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center stating that the number of Methadone deaths from 1992 to 2004 increased per year from 786 in 1999, to 3,849 in 2004.

The deaths were in the 15 to 24-year old age group.

They further report from the Drug Abuse Warning Network which compiles drug related ER visits reported in 2005 that there wee 598,542 drug incidents of which 46,316 were for Methadone.