Drug abuse remains a major society problem in our community and is also a major health problem in our modern society. Thus, education to prevent the young generation to avoid drug abuse and detoxification to help those to quite from the drug abuse are two major key steps in the controlling drug abuse program.~Currently, medications for opiate detoxification, such as methadone, are commonly used worldwide. However, methadone is also an addictive medication. When it is stopped suddenly, patients usually produce unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Meanwhile, methadone is also potentially to be abused too. Thus, it is urgently needed to seek an alternative safer, effective, drug-free method for opiate detoxification. Based on our clinical observation, the timely clearance of toxicities from the body or blood is a safe and effective detoxification method. Thus, we hypothesized that the use of combined hemoperfusion-hemodialysis may be an alternative drug-free, effective, and safe treatment for opiate detoxification. This will be tested in patients who have severe drug abuse and are under custodial conditions by a daily combined hemoperfusion-hemodialysis for 3 days. The efficacy and safety of the hemoperfusion-hemodialysis will be compared to a 10 day standard methadone detoxification treatment.
The purpose of this study is to determine whether combined hemoperfusion-hemodialysis treatment is an alternative drug-free, effective, and safe treatment for opiate detoxification.