Thamkrabok is a faraway place for the very far gone. The Buddhist monastery is set against a Thai landscape that resembles an idyllic Oriental watercolour: all stony outcrops and forested peaks.

Gargantuan statues rise out of the foliage like fevered hallucinations.

Packs of stray dogs snarl at strangers who are not clad in the brown monks' robes or the faded red pyjamas worn by the drug abusers who are staying here.

"Winner" is spelled out hopefully in ancient Buddhist script on the shirt backs of these addicts who are undergoing the world's most extreme - yet possibly most effective - drugs rehabilitation regime.

Hundreds of long-term speed freaks, pill poppers, crack addicts, junkies, glue-sniffers and alcoholics arrive at this stark Buddhist waystation in central Thailand every year to endure a gruelling programme of purging and spartan living.

Though in the West most detox patients eventually succumb to their drug cravings, nearly 70 per cent of the tens of thousands of troubled men and women who have been through treatment at Wat Thamkrabok since 1958 have stayed drug-free, according to one Australian study.

But the place is a far cry from such celebrity-friendly detox haunts as the Priory or Betty Ford clinic. The temple's brutal vomit cure proved too much for Pete Doherty, the self-destructive frontman of the Libertines punk thrash band, who bolted before dawn on day three of his 10-day detox treatment.

He ran away with another English addict who claims he cut short his rehabilitation just two days before it was due to come to an end to give the angst-ridden guitarist moral support.

"The singer seemed unwilling or unable to let go of his dark side," says Phra Hans, a Swiss spiritual counsellor at Thamkrabok. A statement signed by Doherty before he fled says: "Thamkrabok Monastery have done everything they could to help me, but I am not strong enough for this treatment."

Richard, an ex-convict from Leeds who kicked his £3000 ($8500)-a-week "smack and crack habit" seven months ago and is now a monk at Thamkrabok, described the loss of the "two English lads" as disheartening.

"You gotta truly believe in yourself. You can acquire good habits as easily as bad habits. The process has to be painful so you will not want to go through it ever again. It is the toughest detox you will find, and I have tried them all."

About 40 per cent of the monks are former addicts who have stayed at Thamkrabok to become ordained. With cigarettes dangling from their mouths, some look impious, but the abbot, Charoen Panchand, allows them to taper off gradually from nicotine dependence.

Patients line up once a day to swallow a shot glass of a mouth-curdlingly bitter herbal extract which leaves them retching and spewing into concrete gutters.