“Living with the Dirty Secret”: Problems of Disclosure for Methadone Maintenance Clients

This article focuses on the management of stigma by methadone maintenance patients. It explores (1) the consequences of this persistent stigma, which necessitates the need for secrecy, (2) the adaptations made in order to successfully "pass as normal," and (3) the contexts in which methadone-maintained individuals decide to disclose their stigmatized status. The data reported and analyzed were gathered between 1980 and 1989 during a series of studies funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The three studies--"Women on Methadone," "Getting Off Methadone," and "Alameda County Methadone Study"--utilized qualitative, in-depth interviews and ethnographic sampling techniques, primarily chain referral sampling. After ten years of interviewing women and men in various stages of their methadone maintenance careers, recurring themes emerged, one of which was that being a methadone patient is a marginal identity; not quite junkie, not quite conventional. Clients' efforts to manage this stigmatized identity were often shrouded in anguish and secrecy. Methadone patients were in a kind of identity limbo; a holding pattern between two extremely different social worlds. They were trying to effect an identity transformation; however, in many circumstances they were still associated with and defined by their "dirty secret."