It is a drug designed to help people break addictions.

One Tucson man wanted it so badly, he was willing to rob a pharmacy to get it.

It happened yesterday at the Walgreens location at Ina and La Cholla. A man showed a pharmacist a gun and walked away with methadone.

Nevertheless, thanks to some remarkably clear surveillance video, he may not be on the run for long.

The suspect is seen fully-clothed and wore sunglasses and a hat to hide his face in the surveillance video.

“She didn’t’ notice it at first,” Detective Shaun George, from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, explains.

The suspect looks around and into the camera once or twice, then asks for a prescription of methadone.

Det. George says, “He just pulls up his shirt and says, ‘Gimme the methadone. You’ve got 10 seconds’.”

Under his shirt is a gun. The suspect walks off with 100 pills of methadone, but police do not yet know who he is.

“Very thin build, about 160 pounds and six foot tall,” Det. George reveals.

The drug he stole, methadone, is one of the most highly-regulated drugs in the country.

Betty Ross admits, “It takes away all the cramps, all the pain you’re going through from withdrawals.”

Ross says she knows all about it. “The longest I’ve been on it has been six and a half years,” she reveals.

Ross is a former methadone user because she is a former heroin addict. She says she used heroin for 30 years and has been clean for ten. People who steal methadone, she says, are most likely desperate. “It’s very, very long lasting.”

Richard Poppy runs La Frontera’s Methadone Clinic here in Tucson. He says hundreds of thousands of Americans currently use methadone to recover from heroin or a prescription pain killer addiction.

“Someone could take it and you wouldn’t know that they were on it cause they’re not really getting high or low,” Poppy explains.

Unlike other drugs, methadone can be taken often and some people take it for a lifetime. Police believe the man who stole methadone from Walgreens was most likely an addict.

Courtesy: TPD

The suspect authorities are looking for is a white man between the ages of 18 and 22 years old.