Wired and Tired

By Maia Szalavitz, STATS. Posted January 5, 2005.

Wired Magazine joins a long list of major media organizations – from "20/20" to "48 Hours" to the Orlando Sentinel – to be drawn in by the unproven promises of "rapid opioid detox." While the magazine did note that there are serious concerns about proponents' claims to withdraw heroin and other prescription opioid addicts safely and more effectively than other methods, it missed the fact that rapid detox promoters can't even prove their main contention: better relief of withdrawal pain.

Instead, Wired called rapid detox "a useful treatment that can seem like a miracle cure," saying, "for addicts who cannot make it through withdrawal any other way, the $15,000 procedure may be their only hope." It quoted an addiction doctor who "claims [that rapid detox] is one of the most innovative developments in the field since the advent of the 12 step program in the 1930s."

Rapid detox proponents say that they can put an opioid addict to sleep with anesthesia, pump him full of opioid-blocking drugs, and when he awakes, he will suffer no withdrawal symptoms.

But Wired should have been far more skeptical about this notion, given the inflated claims it documented the programs making in other areas. For one, though promoters claim a 65 percent recovery rate after one year (compared to 30-40 percent for other treatments), controlled research doesn't support this. The largest NIDA-funded study found that after three months, those who underwent rapid detox were clean in no greater numbers than those who kicked by other methods.

Claims of safety are also problematic: ordinary detox methods kill no one (withdrawal from opioids itself, while unpleasant, is not deadly) but about a dozen deaths are known to be associated with complications from this procedure. As the Wired article notes, seven of these were caused by one New Jersey doctor – still practicing! – alone. While these deaths appear to be related to lack of proper monitoring of patients under anesthesia and immediately following it (the known deaths followed outpatient, not hospital-based, treatment), there's another risk associated with the procedure that Wired failed to even mention.

Rapid detox involves giving large doses of opioid-blocking drugs, including a follow-up prescription for one called naltrexone to be taken for several months afterwards. This will prevent any new use of opioids from producing a high – and is supposed to reduce craving.

But Australian researchers have found increased overdose death rates amongst heroin addicts who ended naltrexone treatment, compared to those who quit treatment with methadone or buprenorphine. Naltrexone drug reduces patients' tolerances for opioids, so that when they stop taking it, they are at far greater risk of death from doses they used to take without problem if they relapse.

In the Australian study of over 1,200 patients, the overdose rate was eight times higher amongst former naltrexone patients, compared to former methadone or buprenorphine patients. The Wired article didn't include this information.

The magazine did note, however, that many rapid detox programs simply provide the detox, a few follow-up phone calls and a naltrexone prescription: exactly the situation in which such overdoses are likely to go unprevented and undetected.

In terms of comfort, rapid detox proponents claim that because opioid-blockers are administered in high doses while the patient is sedated, the withdrawal period is shortened because the receptors are stripped of opioids, then blocked.

Maia Szalavitz is a senior fellow at the media watchdog group STATS.

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