Is Master Cleanse Safe Or Dangerous?

I'm about to start the Master Cleanse diet to lose some weight but I'm still not sure about it. There's a few things that I need answered before I start with the diet.
Is the Master Cleanse diet good for you? I mean is it really safe or is it dangerous?
Have you tried yourself? How effective was it for you?

A friend of mine tried it and she says it is a scam and that it can be potentially unhealthy but I don't believe her, I want facts.
How long do you think it will take for me to lose up to at lease 20 pounds?

If you follow the Master Cleanse diet, you will lose water not fat. Popular detox diets like the Master Cleanse promise to flush poisons from your body, purge pounds of excess fat, clear your complexion and bolster your immune system.
But experts say there's little evidence that these extreme regimens do anything more than lead to unpleasant, unhealthy side effects that can be dangerous for your health.

We already have nature's most effective detoxification system. It's called the liver. The liver changes the chemical structure of foreign compounds so they can be filtered out of the blood by the kidneys, which then excrete them in the urine.

I do not recommend the Master Cleanse diet at all. Your body wisely shunts toxins into peripheral tissues in order to protect your major organs. These programs release the toxins back into your bloodstream and possibly back to harm major organs, and most people report varying degrees of illness while this is going on.

The guy behind the Master Cleanse was a convicted felon named Stanley Burroughs. He promoted the diet for everything from leukemia to other cancers to stomach ulcers. His book is completely crazy and he thought that germs and viruses were harmless, and that bad food, such as honey ("bee vomit") was the cause of all sickness. We looked into this guy and his diet, including searching out public records, and wrote up our findings on the master cleanse in a post on our blog at CalorieLab:

http://calorielab.com/news/2008/07/17/master-cleanse-in-detail/