A heroin addict elephant who was kept doped up with drug-laced bananas by animal smugglers will return home this weekend after emerging clean from a three-year detox programme.

Big Brother, a four-year-old bull Asian elephant also known as Xiguang, was captured in 2005 in southwest China by the illegal traders, who used the spiked bananas to control him.

Months later, police arrested the traders at the Burmese border and freed Big Brother, only to notice that he was behaving strangely.

As the elephant showed repeated signs of distress, making continuous trumpeting noises with streaming eyes, he was confirmed to be suffering from drug withdrawal symptoms.

Big Brother was sent to a wild animal protection centre on China’s tropical island province of Hainan for rehab, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.

There followed a year of methadone injections at five times the human dosage. After a year vets started to reduce the dose and gradually weaned him off his addiction.

Now clean, Xiguang and three other elephants held by the smugglers are expected to arrive on Saturday at a wildlife park in Kunming, capital of his home province of Yunnan on the Chinese mainland.

Xiguang’s return would cap a 1,500-km journey home, Xinhua said, and mark another step in the elephant’s triumph over addiction.

The Asian elephant is an endangered species, with fewer than 33,000 left in the in wild, according to the WWF animal charity. The animals are killed by humans because they destroy fields and cultivated crops in their search for food. They are also hunted by poachers for their ivory, despite the international ban on the trade.

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