Late last year, Dr. Jerry Rand joined the people on the critically acclaimed Interventions television show to help treat a very difficult case, one that was right up Dr. Rand’s alley. At well over 2 million viewers, the episode turned out to be the most widely watched in the show’s history, with the patient suffering from a viciously painful form of chronic and acute rheumatoid arthritis.

In the wake of Ellen Breyer’s resignation - she will leave her post as Hazelden’s CEO in early April - the venerable non-profit will be left rudderless at a time when most of the institution’s top management posts, from CFO on down, remain vacant. And the ubiquitous William Cope Moyers, who has become the face of Hazelden as its external affairs VP, has reached a deal with the non-profit’s board to stay on - the board was, by all accounts, very eager to keep Cope Moyers - after he gave his notice to Ellen Breyer last year.

In 2003, the Caron Foundation swooped into the South Florida addiction treatment marketplace with its purchase, for an undisclosed sum, of the Renaissance Institute, whose founder Sid Goodman is among the pioneers of the Florida Model of treatment, which has been widely imitated in the region and, many think, kick started renewed addiction treatment growth after the dark days of managed care in the early 1990s.

In early 2004, Peter Labaki was approached by a senior clinician at a local Buffalo, NY, outpatient clinic who knew that Labaki had an extensive background in information technology. “I told her that that there were likely plenty of IT vendors who could meet her needs,” says Labaki. “And that’s when I found out that wasn’t the case.” The clinician began to inform Labaki that she had looked at some systems, including Sequest and Anasazi, and had found them wanting. “They appeared to be, in her eyes, far more geared to the mental health side, and didn’t help much at all with the huge paperwork requirements of the New York state addiction regulators.”

Over the past several years, Sequest Technologies has distinguished itself as among the fastest growing and most prominent purveyors of information technology products to the addiction treatment industry, signing deals with scores of top players, including the Hanley Center, Marworth and Seabrook House, among many others.

Dr. Ed Johnson was first introduced to buprenorphine several decades ago, when he was working at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, KY. He chuckles at the remembrance: “Back in those days, there were only two places you could go to and get medically treated for opiate addiction, with Lexington being one of them,” he recalls, pointing out that it was at a time prior to the passage of the 1974 Narcotics Addiction Treatment Act, which made possible the creation of the nation’s methadone clinic system.

As hurricanes ravaged South Florida’s Treasure Coast, an area that stretches north of Palm Beach along the Atlantic coast where the epicenter of two major hurricanes have landed over the last three years, Savannas Hospital had sustained serious damage.

Over the years, Mark Houston has gained a lot of experience working in the addiction treatment industry, first as an executive at La Hacienda, one of the state of Texas’ most successful private, for-profit substance abuse ventures, and then as CEO of Burning Tree Recovery Ranch, another successful Texas center. But while working as a treatment executive, Houston began to get the sense that there was a need for a new kind of facility, one that was not a treatment center in the traditional or even the licensed sense, but one that would nevertheless fill a gap that Houston perceived as needing to be filled.

Rocking the addiction treatment industry with yet another monster acquisition, CRC Health Corporation - already the nation’s largest treatment provider through a series of deals masterminded by CEO Barry Karlin - announced in early October it had reached an agreement to purchase therapeutic schools and programs leader Aspen Education Group.

Over the years, many in the treatment industry, clinicians and executives alike, have no doubt wondered to what extent the $130 billion a year alcoholic beverage business profits from the millions of pathological adult and underage drinkers who come through the doors at centers nationwide.

As veteran behavioral health practitioners in Hawaii, Dr. Bill Heran and Dr. John Neuhaus had for years watched in dismay as people needing help with addictive illnesses would more often than not leave the islands, heading usually to California or Arizona for private treatment. “We were struck recently by an instance in which a man who had a substantial business here went to California for treatment,” says Heran. “His stay in treatment was quite lengthy, and, partly as a result of his absence, the business ultimately went bankrupt.”

Dr. Richard Metier is a veteran psychiatrist, working for years in one of the South's most storied healthcare institutions, Ochsner Health System in Louisiana. Throughout his career at Ochsner, Dr. Metier had the chance to view first hand the ravages of addiction, treating many patients who were victims of the disease, and of co-occurring disorders as well. "It isn't just the patients I had over years," says Dr. Metier, who recently retired.

Already the nation's largest behavioral health IT provider through its ownership of the former Creative Socio-Medics, last year Netsmart Technologies acquired CMHC Systems, which had been the second largest provider, renaming the new enterprise using the corporate moniker, Netsmart. While the CMHC deal got the most attention, it was not by any means acquisitive Netsmart's only transaction in 2005. The company's purchase of behavioral health online staff training and management systems provider Continued Learning happened much more under the radar, but nevertheless could eventually turn out to be just as important to Netsmart's future growth.

In the late 1990s, Terry Bruce was fed up, and more than a little bit desperate. A member of her immediate family, someone she loved and cherished greatly, had just finished yet another traditional treatment program and had, yet again, promptly relapsed. "I wanted to help them, but what we had been doing didn't appear to be working. I resolved to find out whether there was an alternative that could help my loved one."

When most people think of vaccines they think of protection against viral types of diseases, protection that is brought about by small scale introduction of viruses into the bloodstream, a process that ultimately builds the antibodies needed in the body to produce immunity. And, indeed, this has traditionally been the mechanism and purpose behind vaccination since its widespread use began over 100 years ago.

Five years ago, Californians voted Proposition 36 in by an overwhelming 61 percent margin, passing into state law one of the most enlightened reform efforts with respect to the problem of addiction in many decades. Alarmed at the relentless, and very expensive, growth in prison building in the state, voters correctly identified the problem as being one in which large numbers of drug users were being warehoused in jail as a result of misguided punitive approaches to addiction.

At the turn of the last century, northern Illinois was a hotbed of juvenile justice reform and of the now famous Progressive Movement, which within the justice system sought to apply the newly emerging social and psychological sciences to bring about enlightened reform. The core principal of the northern Illinois reformers - people like Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelly and Jane Addams - was that the justice system should not just meet out punishment, but should also be an instrument of treatment and rehabilitation.