Methadone maintenance is a modality which has been widely hailed and extensively funded as a treatment for heroin addiction. Study of a large New York City program found that three-fifths of the patients who entered treatment had terminated before the end of the second year. Among those in treatment, failure to pick up methadone was common. When patients were divided into cohorts based on eventual length of retention, there was found to be an increase in failure to pick up medication among those retained longest. Crime declined less than had been expected, and decrease in crime was most evident in drug-related crimes rather than in the category of crimes with victims. Re-analysis of evaluations which had reported higher rates of success revealed that many such findings were based on unreliable research methods.