The Coleman Institute Blog

I had a great visit with my patient, Edward (not his name) earlier this week. Edward grew up in West Virginia and started using Oxycontin toward the end of his high school years. He got hooked and when pills became expensive, he started using heroin. Edward is kind, smart, shy, funny and a talented chef. Heroin robbed him of all those things. He spent several agonizing years avoiding relationships, betraying close friends and family, crashing anywhere he could, and basically cutting off any opportunity he had to continue to develop into the person he was capable of being. (more…)

In the last 10 years or so, we have embarked on a big experiment in this country - by allowing much easier access to marijuana.

There are many reasons this has happened. We have come to believe that marijuana is not really that dangerous - a lot safer than alcohol, which of course is legal and quite available. We have also come to believe we could cut out the black market if pot became legal, and we could even generate significant tax dollars if it were legal. Finally, we believe that anyone who wants to get pot will already get it, so legalization won’t really encourage anyone to use it who wasn’t going to use it anyway - and that overall consumption levels will stay the same.

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At The Coleman Institute, we continue to assist people with a medical withdrawal from short acting opiates, but we have a growing number of patients who are seeking our services to help get off of buprenorphine products like Suboxone or Subutex®.

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Why do people love coming to The Coleman Institute? Partly it’s because our method of Rapid Non-Addictive, Medically Assisted Withdrawal from opioids just plain makes the experience tolerable. Our patients are generally highly motivated; they are exhausted from a life of dependence on pills or heroin or alcohol. They desperately want to stop, even though this desire is often coupled with overwhelming fear, anxiety and shame.

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Most people who get into recovery do so when the pain of their using and the pain of their lifestyle is greater than the fear of stopping and trying a new way of life. Usually, this requires a crisis - like a health scare, legal problems, a threatened divorce or something similar.

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