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!

Day 7 - Post Ibogaine, The Experience!

Thought I'd write a little about the actual experience as I haven't yet!

I worked my dose out at the standard opiate addicted persons 15-20mg/kg dose, at 65ks that meant about 1600mg Ibogaine HCL, I took this plus 1000mg TA Extract the first time and it blew my head off and really took me a long time to recover after, so the second and third times I titrated the dose over 24 hours, this last time I took 600mg HCL initially then another 400mg TA about 6 hours later, both ways of dosing had the desired effect, I just didn't want the nausea and intense hallucinations.

My First time was the strongest, at the full 19mg/kg dose all at once. I did throw my guts up, projectile vomiting, but didn't really have any massive spiritual awakening. I did hallucinate, everything went green and purple and I was in the blitz being bombed by the nazi's!

I was quite upset I wasn't shown anything that could help me change my current behaviours, people say it takes some time afterwards for the bits to fall into place.
Also that war type, violent visions are quite a common theme.

Some people say they felt the ibogaine scrubbing them clean from the inside out, a lot of people meet with the plant spirit too.. unfortunately I didn't get that.
I'm quite a spiritual person so was hoping to have a full on psycho-spiritual experience, shame I didn't.

It's what seems to keep people clean in the long run, that and the occasional booster dose...

Ibogaine has been called an 'addiction interuptor' and that's exactly what it does, it will not keep a person clean long term unless there is a determination from that person. Maybe this is why it seems to work in better with people in they're thirties and over?

It breaks the cycle of addiction, takes away 95% of the acute withdrawal symptoms and PAWS but you also need to keep working at your recovery.

Counselling, therapy, yoga, exercise etc all help a great deal.

Physically, I'm feeling 'ok' still lethargic and suffering with restless legs/night sweats and insomnia but it's all bearable, knowing that I don't have to find cash and score every day makes up for it!

What's really amazing this time is I haven't gone into the chronic depression I did when I came off methadone, ibogaine re-sets dopamine/serotonin receptors to a certain degree. This is what causes PAWS, it can take up to a year for the brain to re-adjust to making it's own happy chemicals and not being flooded with opiates constantly..

It also gets harder the longer you are taking it, I know I struggled a lot more this time around than last time..
Three shots at iboga detox in the last eight weeks!

But I persevered because I knew, the first time I took it that this stuff actually works! It's just how you use it..
I made the mistake of thinking I wouldn't need boosters the first time and paid the price, going back into withdrawal after four days and having to relapse as I couldn't get more Ibo..

The 'trip' isn't scary at all, (mind you I've taken my fair share of hallucinogens in the past) It kind of makes you feel safe, but you know something powerful is going on! After about 6 hours the main vision part is over and you go into a kind of catatonic 'dream state' where you can move much, sleep or eat... This feels like it's never going to end and is quite hard to get through..

Weirdly, Ibo also seems to reset your senses too, food tastes strange, you can suddenly smell in stereo technicolour, and sunlight is so bright, taking a puff on a cigarette tastes like an ashtray full of water.!

My partner made me laugh today, he said 'so from where I'm sitting it seems like people coming off heroin are either crying, laughing uncontrollably or masturbating' ... haha .. sounds about right!