Like so many treatment entrepreneurs in recovery, Sherief Abu- Moustafa has come to the realization, post recovery, that any success he may have had, pre-recovery, came pretty much in spite of himself, rather than because of himself. “I know now that God was doing for me,” Sherief says, adding that in the 1990s he had a strong entrepreneurial bent – a well paid, highly trained psychiatric nurse who he says, on the side, made millions speculating in Boston real estate.

Fast forward several years, and Sherief, in recovery and married with a new life in South Florida, has partnered with investors to relaunch a well known halfway house, Florida House, into an ambitious experiment in affordable long-term addiction care, with a continuum that encompasses primary treatment all the way through lightly structured sober living.

Not too long ago, a group of investors got together, some of them addiction docs, but mostly just ordinary investors with a keen interest in backing a truly unique, highly integrated science-based model of addiction treatment, a development that may be the first of its kind ever attempted in the addiction treatment industry.

And this month that model, principally the brainchild of renowned addictionologist Dr. Harold Urschel, came to life in the form of Dallas-based Enterhealth, which just a few weeks ago opened its 16-bed Life Recovery Center, the residential piece of a treatment model that is quite possibly about as entirely evidence-based as exists anywhere in the U.S., or even worldwide, addiction treatment universe. ‘Our goal here was really to examine closely the known science surrounding addiction,” says Urschel, who is...

Bill O'Donnell says he initially had no thought of selling Sierra Tucson, despite having recently sold a majority stake in its sister company, Miraval spa. "But as things moved forward with CRC it became apparent that a deal would probably get done, so I resolved to let go," he said. In the end O'Donnell did let go, selling the institution he founded over 20 years ago for what is probably the highest price ever paid for a single treatment center, $130 million.

The sale caps a career in which O'Donnell remained associated with Sierra Tucson through all of the sharply swinging fortunes of the treatment business over the past two and a half decades.

In the early 1990s, Rimrock Foundation was visited by producers and camera crews from the popular CBS news program 48 Hours. It was a time when legalized wagering was beginning to experience explosive growth, due to largely to tribal expansions into the casino business, and 48 Hours had come to Rimrock’s facility in Billings, Montana, to examine some of the fallout from gambling’s rapid spread. "They spent about a week here, and they were fascinated by what they found out," says Rimrock CEO David Cunningham, adding that it was clear to the 48 Hours journalists when they left that there was indeed a very dark underbelly to wagering’s blistering pace of expansion throughout America.

What the journalists found at Rimrock, a venerable non-profit that this year is celebrating 40 years in...

Not too long ago, Chaz Cabela came across a case, a female desperately in need of help, where he could not refuse admission, even though the woman did not have the means to pay for care. A wealthy scion of a catalogue and retailing family, Cabela has sharply boosted the charity care offered at South Florida-based Advanced Recovery Center, ARC, since he bought the cen- ter two years ago. “If there was ever a case of desperate need, this was it,” says Cabela, who is of that unique and ubiquitous type of treatment industry entrepreneur, the type who goes to treatment, gets clean, and then decides to buy or start a treatment center...

In Cabela’s case, he bought a center that is among the nation’s leading providers of extended care treatment ser- vices for those suffering from addiction combined with strong co-occurring psychiatric afflictions.

A few years ago, Percy Menzies made a decision to get into the treatment business, opening a center in St. Louis that was built on the highly medical model that he had been promoting as a consultant for many years.

Menzies’ belief in the efficacy of a medical model stemmed from his years as a top level product manager at Dupont, where he helped bring naltrexone to market, first as an anti-craving treatment for heroin in the 1980s and then for the treatment of alcoholism in the 1990s.

And Menzies admits it was a frustrating experience at times: “Dupont basically brought naltrexone out just like any other drug, with a big focus on the general practitioner MDs.”

A few years ago, Ray Blatt found himself confronted with a very serious problem. Someone he loved had succumbed to the disease of addiction and needed to get some help fast.

What eventually was decided upon was to send Ray’s loved one to a well known highend treatment center in Arizona, where Ray visited during family week.

“That was really a very eye-opening experience for me,” says Blatt, a young real estate entrepreneur from Northern California. “During family week, the treatment center did such excellent and difficult work with us that it increased my respect immensely for the whole treatment process.”

A few years ago, Mark Houston began to get the idea that he wanted to do something different after having worked for years as a top industry executive in the Texas addiction treatment market. And, besides, Houston had always had a bit of the entrepreneurial bug. “I wasn’t getting any younger,” he says, adding that conditions seemed right, the treatment market having more than fully recovered from the deep managed care induced recession of the 1990s.

So, he approached a financial backer and the two worked out a deal where the investor would provide financing in return for a 50 percent silent partnership in Houston’s proposed treatment venture.

About a year ago, Robb and Debb Holub watched as their son emerged from a medically induced coma, mouthing the words to the favorite song his worried parents had played over and over again in the hospital room at Palomar Medical Center north of San Diego.

As Joey Holub was on his way toward a miraculous recovery - he had sustained serious head wounds after being hit by a car, and was weeks away from walking out of the hospital on a path to making a full recovery - his parents began thinking about how they could give something back. The answer came when a friend of Joey’s, Jason Moscartolo, showed up to wish his friend well. “We had sent Joey to a wilderness program and then on to a therapeutic school in an effort to help him with his addiction to opiates,” says Debb Holub.

Not too long ago, a wealthy Southern California construction entrepreneur fell victim to intense and highly debilitating pain. An internal morphine pump was then installed, upon which the entrepreneur later became very highly dependent. Worried family members, who had witnessed the man’s descent from a vigorous individual engaged with life, to a listless, unmotivated and demoralized opiate addict, approached clinicians at Bayside Marin, a Northern California high-end center, seeking help.

“This man had a real sense that he could never again live without that internal morphine pump,” says Roland Williams, a 20-yr treatment industry veteran who has been the clinical director at Bayside Marin since its opening several years ago. “But we asked him if he was really ready to throw in the towel on his life...

A few years ago, Dr. Douglas Cook was driving down a country road near his treatment center in Monroe, LA. He spied a little store off the road, drove in and bought a quart of beer. Just like that, banal in its details, began Dr. Cook’s tale of relapse. As industry clinicians know well, the moment of relapse can often be similarly banal for many addicts: a small trigger, a snap decision and, of course, denial, always denial.

It’s the back stories behind the banality of these relapse moments that are often anything but banal, and so it was in the case of Dr. Cook, overwhelmed as he was at the time by a setback in his son’s battle with kidneys that hadn’t worked properly since the day he was born. “It had been a long, heart wrenching experience...

Several years ago, Richard Pops took the time to look closely at the state of the addiction treatment field, and what he saw was opportunity.

Then CEO of drug delivery powerhouse Alkermes Inc., Pops - who early last month ascended to the chairmanship of the company, with former COO David Broecker moving up into the CEO post - began to realize that the company’s long lasting Medisorb drug delivery technology might fit ideally within an addiction pharmaceutical treatment context.

Not too long ago, a client arrived at Clear Haven Center that presented the center with a unique set of challenges.

The client, a male, had a virtually uncontrollable compulsion to wash and bathe himself, a compulsion that manifested itself through excess washing and an anxious focus on issues of his personal hygiene. And, as is common in so many cases like this, where strong issues of control are involved, the client self medicated his enormous anxiety to the point where the primary problem had now become one of chronic substance abuse.

“We were sent the client by a psychiatrist in Toronto who was at his wits end trying to help this man,” says Clear Haven co-founder Terry Orsten, who runs the business side of the treatment center...

As early as the 1960s, Dr. David Smith, along with addiction medicine colleagues like Dr. Donald Wesson, were looking into whether compounds like flumazenil and naltrexone were effective in combating the disease of addiction. Of course, these compounds now form the basis of pharmacological-based treatments that many, including Dr. Smith, believe are just the vanguard of a wave of new treatments that will one day fundamentally alter how addiction is treated and, indeed, perceived.

As founder of the storied Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, Dr. Smith developed the nation’s first outpatient detox program, and he believes that “there are many things coming down the line that many people in the treatment field just don’t seem to be prepared for.”

Back in the 1970s, Don Mullaney was leading a colorful double existence, by day working for Rensselaer County in upstate New York teaching prevention in the schools, while partying very hardy at night. Fast forward a few decades, and Mullaney is one of the very top players in the booming South Florida market for private addiction treatment services. As the founder of Behavioral Health of the Palm Beaches, Mullaney was a pioneer of the Florida Model of care, a cross between outpatient and residential developed in the 1990s that helped lead the treatment industry out of the darkest days of the managed care cutbacks.

About 20 years ago, Chris Crosby, now CEO of thriving South Florida-based Watershed Treatment Programs, was working at Boca Ratonbased Anon Anew as an interventionist. Crosby was one of many such interventionists throughout the nation who then mostly worked as quasi in-house marketing agents at treatment centers around the country.

Trained at the Johnson Institute, which was founded by the famed Vernon Johnson, who is credited by many of today’s interventionist as the founder of the interventions profession, Crosby says he and his colleagues would visit places like emergency rooms looking for appropriate treatment candidates. “Some saw us as kind of like ambulance chasers,” says Crosby. “But I didn’t see it that way at all. We did a lot of good and got a lot of people into treatment...

CRC is Minting Money With Methadone, But Its Opiate Clincs May Not Play Well on Wall Street

About four years ago, Phil Herschman approached Barry Karlin with a deal to buy a group of methadone clinics scattered throughout the country. Ultimately, Karlin teamed up with Herschman and bought the methadone clinics in a transaction that was to set CRC Health Group down a very profitable, yet potentially controversial, path of major expansion into the methadone maintenance business.

Methadone maintenance is disdained by many in the treatment industry as a therapy that simply replaces addiction to one drug for another. And while much of the medical community and government agencies like SAMHSA have been strong supporters of...

Almost forty years ago, doctors in tiny Norton, KS - a mostly agricultural enclave in the Northwestern part of the state - began to notice that an alarmingly large number of admissions to the local emergency room seemed to have a common substance abuse thread.

Instead of ignoring the addiction issue, as most med surg facilities do to this day, Norton’s small team of medical professionals decided to call Dr. William Leipold, who was then working several states away in North Dakota running a substance abuse program there. Dr. Leipold came to Norton and began looking into the local substance abuse problem, with the upshot that a small twelve-bed inpatient center was opened in a state facility nearby.

From that small program grew what is today known as Valley Hope Association...

Several years ago, Caron Foundation’s information technology director Bob Wagner found himself at a fork in the road, needing a new IT system. For years, Caron - which in the 1990s effectuated a remarkable turnaround under CEO Doug Tieman’s new leadership - had used Substance Abuse Treatment Information System, SATIS, Betty Ford’s in-house system that the renowned treatment center had decided to commercialize in the 1990s.

At the time of its commercial launching, SATIS was not only a pioneering IT effort within the treatment industry, but also within the highly underdeveloped general healthcare IT world as well. But, after snagging about 30 treatment industry clients - including leading players like Rosecrance and Cumberland Heights - Betty Ford eventually made a strategic decision to exit the commercial information technology...