In a previous incarnation as a technology writer for publications like Red Herring and Telephony, I had the privilege to cover voice-over-Internet-protocol, VOIP, during Internet telephony's early days in the mid to late 1990s. At the time, the pundits were predicting, but it was by no means certain, that VOIP would sweep the nation as a highly disruptive technology in the telecommunications industry, bringing lower prices and greater transparency to consumers. Later on, a few years later fresh out of treatment and having landed a little early sobriety job as the Business Editor of the tiny Boca Raton News, a report crossed my desk that got me quite excited.

The War on Drugs has its roots in a U.S. lead prohibition effort that began over one hundred years ago, an initiative that has ultimately resulted in the criminalization of non-prescription drug use in practically every nation on earth. In the wake of the explosion of drug use following the Vietnam War, the War on Drugs in its current aggressive and malignant form began with the creation of the DEA, along with other programs and legislation, during the Nixon administration. And, now, the newest numbers from the Justice Department are just the latest in a long line of events and data that prove the abject failure of one of the most misguided policies in the history of this nation.

For years, we at Treatment Magazine have watched as one addiction treatment entrepreneur and investor after another focused their time, energy and capital on the high-end of the addiction treatment marketplace. CRC abandoned its affordable moniker after buying Sierra Tuscon in 2005, and even affordable care icons like The Right Step’s George Joseph have caught margin fever.

The idea of suing a casino for one’s gambling losses may to most seem absurd, and to us it did too, until we heard Arelia Taveras’ story.

Taveras says she lost about a million dollars in Atlantic City - she admits she pilfered client escrow accounts to finance her habit - in a gambling run that went out of control. And now she’s suing a group of casino’s for $20 million, saying the casinos knew she was out of control because, for example, she would gamble for days straight while actually falling asleep at the tables.

Taveras probably won’t get a dime from her efforts - and maybe she doesn’t even deserve to - but her suit illustates a key point about gambling, which is that gambling addicts are, and always have been, a casino’s best customer.

In 1989, at the dawn of our industry's battle with managed care, Pennsylvania legislators passed a bill that contained some of the most ironclad language guaranteeing access to quality inpatient treatment that has ever been approved by any legislature at any time in this country's history. Yet, throughout the 1990s, as managed care wrought its apocalypse on inpatient treatment in Pennsylvania and throughout the nation, the historic state law sat on the books gathering dust, unenforced.

Since the birth of modern American substance abuse treatment over 50 years ago with the introduction of Hazelden’s Minnesota Model, the U.S. addiction treatment system has emerged as world’s gold standard. Today, our private treatment facilities attract people from the far corners of the earth seeking a new life based on sobriety and abstinence from mood altering chemicals.

In his farewell speech in 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower famously described the rapidly expanding influence of something he identified as a powerful “military industrial complex,” warning that such a complex was then beginning to be built around a growing standing military, the burgeoning armaments industry and the new federally funded scientific research community. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of undue influence by the miltary industrial complex,” he cautioned.

In this our April 2006 issue, Treatment Magazine’s Special Report focuses on the venerable Hanley Center, which probably more than any other institution is responsible for the emergence of South Florida as one of the nation’s premier regions for addiction treatment, on a par now with Minnesota, Southern California and Arizona.

In our Premiere Issue last July, Treatment Magazine asked the question “Is Industry Consolidation Treatment’s Inevitable Future?” It now appears, with very little doubt, that that question has been answered in the affirmative. Following CRC Health Group’s blockbuster $720 million sale to Bain Capital, announced last fall, big private equity players are examining addiction and behavioral health investment opportunities. And some, like American Capital, are stepping up and paying big money for premier properties.