Detox 5, the 'wakeful detox' - Too good to be true?

A friend recently asked my thoughts about 'detox 5', the private, magical, five day (private) heroin detox. 

Detox 5, is a very successful business model, They charge £3200 for an ultra rapid opiate detox (UROD)

The idea being, you go in with a heroin/methadone/subutex/morphine/fentanyl habit and leave five days later clean!.. (note there's no difference between the opiates, they treat for any of them)

Sound too good to be true?!... Read on..

Using a combination of midazolam and naltrexone, you will be 'sedated' whilst precipitated withdrawal is induced using naltrexone. 

They recommend you opt for the (very expensive) naltrexone implant for at least 12 months after your treatment. This is if you even get that far.

I've known maybe half a dozen people that have subjected themselves to D5, all of them left (one halfway through) left treatment and relapsed. 

They have a great hook, I'll grant them that.. A 'comfortable, easy detox'  that you'll barely remember, what isn't so clear as you hand your money over is their version of sedation and yours are likely very different.

It would be too impractical to fully sedate patients. They would need to be fed and hydrated, catheterised both ends etc etc.. all requiring constant monitoring.

Fluids mean IV access, something that requires medical training and constant monitoring. 

Sounds expensive huh? All those doctors and nurses...

In reality you'll actually be medicated orally, given water to drink and food as required. 

Yeah, you're given benzos, but just enough so your still awake enough to talk, use the bathroom and take your meds. 

You'll most likely still piss and shit the bed, conscious but too out of it to get to the bathroom.

This is your five day detox;

On day one your settled in, given a medical and maybe a Valium. 

Day two your given you first dose of midazolam, a very useful benzo usually used for dental work and day patient hospital investigations. 

Your kept 'sedated for a couple of days to start the withdrawal process, if your coming off heroin you'll be at the peak of the detox, methadone? Barely scratching the surface, methadone withdrawal doesn't even really start to kick in for three days, subutex is similar.

As we all know naltrexone is an opiate antagonist. 

It's used to reverse heroin overdoses and is doing pretty much the same thing to you. 

Day three/four you'll get your 'challenge dose'

Your gonna go into precipitated withdrawals. The worst, most acute, painful thing you've ever experienced. Hopefully your sedated enough that you sort of dream your way through it!?

You'll ask to be sedated more, they'll refuse and tell you that you you've reached your maximum allowance.

What do you do? Well nothing, what can you do? Your bowels are liquidising and you feel like your dying but you aint going anywhere! 

Day five is much the same, they titrate your naltrexone up to 'throw' any remaining opiates out. 

Naltrexone has a very short half life do you'll be given a dose every couple of hours. 

You shit and snot your way through four days of hell, semi lucid, the odd five minutes of sleep if your lucky, begging for more sedation and being refused, until you reach day five. Hey, your clean my good sir! 

Yes, all those years of abuse magically washed away!

They stop giving you benzos and as you come around you realise you stink, your still in withdrawals and that the pretty nurse you fancy has spent the last three days wiping your ass. 

'Time to leave, we need the bed' you're told

One day turn around til the next lot on Monday. 

'The doctor needs his weekend off!'

So, I think you get the gist of it. 

It's an overpriced, painful and quite disturbing way to detox. 

If your new to opiates, maybe with only a year or two of using heroin then this may work out for you. 

Any long term junkie with a methadone or subutex habit doesn't stand a chance. 

Methadone takes weeks and months to detox from, not days. You'll be hitting the peak of the withdrawal as they're chucking you out the door...

One friend discharged himself on day three because he wasn't sedated enough and in agony. 

He got in the car and DROVE home! Obviously under the influence of some pretty heavy benzos still. He crashed the car into a lamppost and luckily didn't die. 

I did some digging into the actual company too. They have a pretty dubious history. Very profitable though!

On their own website they state a '97% completion' rate, this is printed in bold on every page, very, very misleading. 

Completion merely means patients that didn't discharge themselves and completed the five days. They're bandying it around like it's an abstinence at 12 months statistic

Dig a little deeper you come across a 70% rate. 

Sounds great doesn't it!?

What that actually equates to though is 70% of the 50% of patients who replied to the survey, attained abstinence for twelve months WITH a naltrexone implant. 

Anyone with an implant is literally unable to get high so yes, they would logically and by default be abstinent. 

50% of the people surveyed didn't respond so we can assume they relapsed. This means we're down to one in three.

These stats by the way, were removed from the site recently. They were well out of date, 2001 I believe.

As I said before, the only statistic they have on the site is the '97% success rate' one, after lots of googling I can't find much more than that, they don't back up this '97%' with any in depth analysis, I find this very telling but make your own conclusions.

They have, through the clever use of meta tags and SEO managed to get themselves onto the first three four pages of google results, most of the other information is from unhappy customers.

Long and short of it?

Unless you've only been using a year I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, let alone pay for the pleasure..!

Here's my alternative, get a load of Xanax, diazepam and some Imodium, get a mate to drop in and check on you ever day, knock yourself out with benzos for three days then go to your gp and ask for oral naltrexone!
Same thing, without the medical staff, rules and regs of a 'rehab' and the £3,200 price tag.. !

Next up I'll be giving you a rundown of 'Narcanon', a U.S based rehab based on the philoshies of Ron L Hubbard. Very interesting it will be too! Lot's of weird stuff goes down at the 'most succesful' rehabs in the states.. Scientology and recovering, detoxing drug addicts? Sounds highly questionable to me!