Giant junkie

Okay, this is a new one:

An elephant has kicked his heroin habit after a three-year stint on an island rehab in southern China, an official and state media said Thursday.

The four-year-old Asian elephant, called Xiguang, has now being transported to a wildlife reserve in southwest China after being cured of his addiction with some clean living on Hainan island, Xinhua said.

Xiguang became hooked on the narcotic after animal smugglers captured him and other elephants by luring them with bananas laced with heroin in 2005, the official news agency said.

[...]

Police caught the smugglers in May 2005 on the border between China and Myanmar, and noticed that Xiguang was acting strangely, the Beijing News website reported.

His eyes kept streaming, he made continuous trumpeting noises, and was finally diagnosed with withdrawal symptoms from the drug, the report said.

Damn. I don't think I'd want to be anywhere near an elephant going through heroin withdrawal. I've seen Trainspotting, and it looked unpleasant enough with skinny Scots rather than elephants.

Oh, and how did they get him to kick?

Xiguang was sent to a wild animal protection centre in Hainan, where rehabilitation experts and vets gave him injections of methadone -- five times the dose needed for a human being -- for a year, Xinhua said.

After a year, he had started to recover, and the dose of medicine was progressively reduced.

Where do you even find that much methadone? The elephant methadone clinic?