Drug Rehab for Methamphetamine Addiction

BEN Cousins is likely to be malnourished, exhausted and suffering severe withdrawal-related depression as he starts his first week in a drug rehab program, says a world-leading drug rehab expert. Richard Rawson, of the University of California’s Integrated Substance Abuse Programs unit, said most people entering drug rehab for methamphetamine addiction struggled with intense withdrawal symptoms for between three days and two weeks while in drug detox.

“If someone is heavily addicted and biologically profoundly dependent then the first week of addiction treatment is going to be spent on them sleeping and eating and getting their brain back to functioning,” Prof Rawson said yesterday. “They feel depressed, hopeless, they can’t think, they can’t concentrate, they’re anxious.”
“The acute withdrawal period is totally dependant on the severity of the addiction – It can be as little as a few days or as much as ten days to two weeks when is over.

“For most people, it is two, three or four days before they are able to actually start functioning better and feeling better – it’s pretty quick.”

Cousins, 29, began his drug rehab program yesterday and is expected to remain in addiction treatment for at least a month.

The disgraced former Eagles star is believed to have checked into a luxury addiction treatment center where he stayed for four weeks in April.

Cousins arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday morning and was picked up at the international airport by two blondes – who are believed to be employees of the addiction treatment center – in a sports car.

Prof Rawson, whose UCLA team works with Summit Centre, said the intense lows of withdrawing from methamphetamine addiction came due to a lack of dopamine in the brain. “Dopamine is one of the brain chemicals that is involved with experiencing pleasure, and methamphetamine stimulates the release of dopamine in very high amounts, so you affect your own brain chemistry,” he said. “The brain changes that have happened to methamphetamine users are very powerful and if you use methamphetamine over time your dopamine system gets depleted and actually gets damaged. The withdrawal from methamphetamine in large part is the dopamine system recovering – and it takes a while.

“Initially for two or three days you are going through the acute recovery, but then you see the much longer term protracted withdrawal which lasts for four to six months where the brain still hasn’t fully recovered.” He said the intense depression-like symptoms that accompanied withdrawal from methamphetamine were not treatable with medication.

“Their dopamine system has been depleted so they feel bad and they get these symptoms that feel like depression, but the chemistry is completely different,” he said.

“Unfortunately we don’t have any good treatments – the use of anti-depressants doesn’t appear to be very helpful in this kind of situation.

“There’s a tremendous amount of effort and money going into looking for medications to help that process but we don’t have them right now.

“All we have is the brain healing itself but that takes a long time.”

Prof Rawson said after a relapse, addicts would be starting from scratch in their battle to beat the meth addiction.

Cousins was not seen yesterday outside the addiction treatment center, which is located in a hidden canyon at the end of a long road behind a high fence and security gate. It is believed Cousins will remain inside the drug rehab center until he is deemed ready to join other in-patients on supervised group excursions outside the property.

Many rehab facilities do not allow patients to leave the grounds supervised by either staff members or with family until they are several weeks into addiction treatment.

In the latter stages of the month Cousins spent at the drug rehab center in April, he regularly attended a local gym accompanied by a staff member and a personal trainer.

Prof Rawson said most methamphetamine addicts entering drug rehab were malnourished and exhausted because they had not been eating and sleeping due to the effects of the drugs. “Methamphetamine is an appetite suppressant and many people when they get on big runs of methamphetamine won’t eat for days in a row and they will lose a lot of weight,” he said.

“We see a lot of meth users come in to treatment who are 10 to 20 percent lower than their normal body weight because they’ve been using.

“They come in pretty malnourished in many cases.”

When Cousins arrived in the US to begin addiction treatment for the first time in April, his face was noticeably gaunt. His initial four-week treatment for crystal meth addiction- which boasts a gourmet chef, pool and luxury accomodation in a Mediterreanean mansion – was believed to have cost tens of thousands of dollars, with the Eagles understood to have paid. Cousins will be footing the bill himself during this drug rehab stint, with a spokeswoman for the Eagles saying the club was not financially involved in his second round of addiction treatment.

“We aren’t paying any of the fee this time around,” she said yesterday.

Prof Rawson said the addiction treatment center did not have a proven track record of treating addicts successfully. “They have made an attempt to use content information (in their programs) that has some scientific support and to have an independent group do some outcome evaluation,” he said.

“But the fact is we don’t have any data that we can point right now that shows their outcomes are any better or any worse than anybody else’s.”

He also criticized the high-priced drug rehab facilities in Malibu, saying that a lot of them were over-priced and not delivering on outlandish claims in their marketing material.

“Some of them attempt to do a good job with good information, others are completely preying on the fears of families and have very sophisticated marketing activities so they draw people in thinking $60,000 ($A65,049) is what it should cost for addiction treatment,” he said.

“They have these resort-type places where people are kind of given the attitude of if you pay enough money and you go to one of these places in Malibu obviously it’s got to be better than what we have in our hometown, and that’s not the case.

“It completely depends on which facility you go to and it’s very difficult because none of them publish any data and none of them have any research to prove that they work.

For help with crystal meth addiction you can call the national addiction helpline at 1-800-511-9225.