Some prescription drug addicts in New Brunswick are forced to regularly travel to Nova Scotia for help kicking their habits, because they would have to wait years for treatment in their home province.

Dr. Bill Doran, who runs a small methodone clinic in Wolfville, N.S., said he takes patients from New Brunswick because the treatment situation in the neighbouring province is so dire.

"My information is that the waiting list is at least two years and sometimes infinitely long, that there's really no realistic chance of getting into a methadone maintenance program in New Brunswick," Doran said.

In fact, there are 624 people in the Methadone Maintenance Program in the province and slightly more than that — 628 — on the waiting list.

Sherry Roberts, a recovering addict in Moncton, said that when she wanted help to kick the addiction, she couldn't find it in New Brunswick. She fell into drug addiction two years ago and has been on the waiting list for treatment in Moncton for 1½ years, she said.

So she decided to go the extra mile — or, rather, 240 kilometres — from Moncton to Wolfville, and back each month to visit Doran's clinic.

"I was going to end up dead if I kept on doing the drugs," Roberts said.

"I started doing Percocets, sniffing them, swallowing them, and then one day somebody said, instead of doing all those Percocets, just do this one pill, and that's how I started doing … Dilaudid and hydromorphine," Roberts said.

It was supposed to be only a one-time thing, but it got so she couldn't go one day without them, she said.

Doran said he gives his New Brunswick patients checkups and drug tests to make sure they're clean. He then writes them prescriptions for methadone, which can be filled at a Moncton pharmacy.

He said a great deal of addicts are likely to end up dead if the waiting times for methadone treatment aren't dramatically reduced.

"Without methadone, they're doomed to continue [drug use] until they die or go to jail, or something really bad happens."