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King County, Washington, jail and public health officials are seeking approval to start providing methadone to prisoners addicted to heroin and other opiates, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Tuesday. Only one other jail in the country, New York City's Rikers Island, currently offers methadone maintenance for prisoners.

A synthetic opiate, methadone is used as an oral opiate substitute for people strung out on other opiates, such as heroin, morphine, or oxycodone, the main ingredient in Oxycontin. Methadone maintenance therapy has been found to help addicts stabilize their lives, thus reducing public costs of addiction by reducing drug-related offenses and emergency room expenditures.

"It's going to save taxpayer money in the long haul -- plus give people a chance for a better life," Deb Cummins, a drug treatment manager with the state, told the newspaper.

King County has already budgeted $200,000 for staffing and medications for 2006, as well as an additional $150,000 for community treatment vouchers for inmates on their way out jail.

But methadone maintenance therapy is governed by a thicket of bureaucracies, ranging from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and Center for Substance Abuse Treatment to the Washington state Board of Pharmacy and Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), making approval an arduous process. DSHS is currently considering the King County health department's application for certification -- the first step in the process.

On any given day, the King County Jail holds between 300 and 400 opiate-addicted inmates, said Mike Alstead, head of the Jail Opiate Dependency Engagement and Treatment program (JODET). According to the county's application, the program would start next spring and eventually provide methadone for between 50 and 100 patients per day. The target population will be long-term addicts arrested for misdemeanors or not-so-serious felonies, Alstead told the Post-Intelligencer.

The program also envisions a separate, short-term program for incoming inmates who are addicted, but don't enroll or qualify for the program. Those inmates would be given a 12-day, low-dose methadone program to get them through physical withdrawal.

"What we're trying to do is focus on the people who have the opioid dependency but are also the ones who return to jail over and over again so we can interrupt that cycle," said Alstead."

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