How the super rich do detoxes... in five-star privacy

George is in a five-star hotel in the Caribbean, drying out. The worst of the physical withdrawal is over — the sweats, the bone-crunching pain, the sensation that the cicadas outside are somehow drilling into his brain — but his sheets are still changed twice daily and the maid, who for weeks has mopped up his vomit and diarrhoea, now exchanges polite words with the nurse checking his pulse at his bedside.

Palm fronds frame his view of the beach, but George mostly sleeps. Back in London, his family wait. George, 26, is coming off heroin and methadone. He’s on this island for a ‘private detox’. As well as the nurse, who alleviates his symptoms with non-addictive medication, he’s with a ‘sober buddy’ — a specially chosen, clean companion who has also been through recovery — and Johan Sorensen, an addiction consultant with 20 years’ experience running clinics such as Life Works in London, which is now owned by The Priory Group.

Sorensen, 40, a striking figure with Nor-wegian and New Zealand parentage who looks like Sigurd Ibsen, is at the forefront of seismic changes in the way addiction is being treated. Forget dingy hospital rooms with grey light and white-boiled food — London has rapidly become a world leader in addiction treatment, meeting the demands of the oligarchs and oil-rich who want to dry out on the same heavy thread-counts that feather their cushioned lives.

These five-star private detoxes are often the first choice for the upper, upper echelons, who can be as paranoid about privacy as they are desperate to get off drugs or alcohol. Clients are handpicking their own teams of doctors, therapists and nurses to tend to their needs in the comfort of a hotel.

Sorensen is the first to admit that some of his experiences have been so over-the-top that ‘it’s like detox in Disney World’. But he’s there 24/7. While talking to him, his phone buzzes constantly. One client is concerned that they might relapse after a traumatic event over the weekend, another because of an issue around business. He describes his as ‘a creative approach’ to treating long-term chronic addiction. His name is passed word-of-mouth and his tailored treatment might include travelling medics, home detoxes, round-the-clock nurses, psychotherapists and sober buddies. For those wanting to avoid the lengthy timescale of a detox (normally several weeks) there is a rapid opiate detox, which — frighteningly enough — involves a general anaesthetic and a blood transfusion, ‘but it’s dangerous,’ cautions Sorensen, ‘and has a high relapse rate.’

He prefers five-star hotels to rented apartments or private homes, he confides, ‘because if your patient is about to relapse and locks you out, the management will be very willing to help you get to them. Believe me. No hotel wants a death on the premises.’

He’s not the only one offering this kind of service. As I write, one doctor has a Saudi Arabian patient coming off a two bottles of whisky a day habit in a suite on Park Lane, ‘which will probably cost around £40,000 in total’. Meanwhile, London’s private rehabilitation clinics — including the Capio Nightingale in Marylebone, The Priory in Roehampton, where doctors work with cross-addictions, from sex and love addiction to issues such as eating disorders, and Promis in South Kensington — have rapidly become some of the best in the world. London’s services, says Sorensen, ‘beat hands-down anything New York currently has to offer’ — a fact apparently recognised by the US healthcare giant Acadia this month when it hoovered up The Priory Group for £1.3 billion.

Of course, doctors prefer people to detox as inpatients in hospital. ‘It’s really no joke,’ says Dr Niall Campbell, a 56-year-old consultant psychiatrist at The Priory, where a stint costs £4,000 a week. Campbell, who speaks in a soft Ballymeena burr and is well-known for his laconic humour, says: ‘Detoxing from alcohol can quite literally kill you. If you’ve been drinking heavily, 24 to 48 hours after stopping you may have a withdrawal seizure and once you have one you’re likely to have another.’ The DTs (delirium tremens, a severe symptom of withdrawal) ‘are a medical emergency — they can cause hallucination and raised blood and heart pressure’.

But Campbell will listen to his patients’ preferences. As will Sorensen. ‘The rule used to be that unless you agreed to come in for treatment, doctors wouldn’t treat you,’ he says. ‘It was about suffering. But if addiction is a disease, as we believe it is, why should we make people suffer?’ Sorensen says what makes London’s treatment so innovative is the open-minded attitude — the willingness to be flexible around how patients experience their detox hell. ‘And why not tailor it for clients?’ he argues. ‘Now the profession recognises that you engage with people no matter what stage they are at. If they want their butler, fine. If they want to do some spa treatments, fine. You want them to get clean. Obviously, we assess patients first. Some are not suitable for private detox. There might be complicating medical factors, like a triple heart bypass.’

Although alcohol and cocaine still lead the addiction league tables (alcohol accounts for 80 per cent of all substance abuse), there are more drugs than ever today. Legal highs — termed as such because chemical compounds are altered very slightly to keep ahead of classification by the government — are available to buy online with starred reviews, like products on Amazon. ‘Legal high does not mean safe,’ explains Dr William Shanahan, the medical director of the Capio Nightingale hospital. He lists party drugs such as mephedrone or M-CAT (dubbed ‘meow meow’ in the press), a cathinone and ‘a cousin of speed’. ‘And then there are rust strippers like GHB and GBL. People take capfuls of that [but] after a few months you need it every few hours or you have an incredible tremor. When you try to stop, you go crazy and have fits. You might need to go to ICU and be intubated.’

While legal highs are often a preserve of the young, Sorensen reports an upsurge in addiction problems for a new demographic — people in their forties or fifties. ‘Those who took Ecstasy in the 1990s rave scene, before knuckling down to highly successful careers and kids. Now their kids have grown up, there’s this trend for people to try to recapture their youth.’ He says they go to Ibiza and rent villas for hundreds of thousands a week, with staff, catering and famous DJs; or they take private jets to Burning Man festival, or party yachts. ‘And it’s having a detrimental effect on the stability of their marriages and their work.’

Dr Natasha Bijlani, 52, a consultant psychiatrist at The Priory, admits that some ‘extremely wealthy’ patients can be ‘challenging’: ‘I think it’s because they can buy what they want and select the people around them. They don’t necessarily have to work and if they do, they’ve usually earned wealth and are used to getting what they want. They don’t deal very well with being managed.’ One of the biggest hurdles of detox can be the first tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA): admitting you are powerless. ‘For someone who has built up or inherited great wealth to admit that they are powerless is probably the most difficult thing of all — but not impossible.’ Meeting clients where they are at, rather than forcing them to fit in with a traditional approach, is where doctors like Bijlani and her colleagues are making huge progress. ‘You need someone clever enough to engage the patient,’ she says. ‘The process may take longer than normal, but it can be done.’

Most clinics are underpinned by the basic principles of the (free) 12-step fellowships, such as AA and Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and use group therapy in their treatment. ‘Group therapy is better than one-on-one,’ says Dr Campbell. ‘Addiction is a lonely place — treatment needs to address that.’ But sometimes it’s precisely the group therapy element that makes patients resistant. It’s taken over a year for Sorensen to persuade one patient — a Scottish aristocrat with a bottomless trust fund and a tendency to lock himself in a room and drink bottles of vodka — to set foot in a clinic. Instead he’s attempted several home detoxes with a doctor and nurse on hand. Finally, Sorensen got him to meet Old Etonian Cosmo Duff Gordon, 47, a former heroin addict who founded Start2Stop in a pretty mews in South Kensington. Rooms are clean, white and comfortable, with flowerpots outside. Duff Gordon offers both a 100-day outpatient care programme for £7,500 and a 19-bed long-term residential ‘proposition’ at £4,500 a month. The residential programme is for those immediately out of ‘acute care’ rehab for whom a return to their old life would mean a certain return to old ways. It’s the first of its kind in the country. ‘Let’s just say an urbane Scottish aristocrat has no problem fitting in there,’ says Sorensen of Start2Stop. The Priory Group is, of course, notorious for its links with glamour and celebrity — former inmates include Johnny Depp, Lily Allen, Kate Moss, Ronnie Wood and Robbie Williams.