The Coleman Institute Blog

It should be no surprise to anyone reading this that we are in the middle of the worst opioid epidemic to ever strike our country. Thanks to fentanyl (a powerful synthetic opioid), the 2016 mortality figures are even worse than 2015 – over 60,000 deaths. To put this in perspective, there were more overdose deaths in that one year than the entire Vietnam war! How did we possibly get here?

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Helping to restore people to wholeness is really what our business is. For those who have taken a detour on their road to being the best version of themselves, we offer hope. We get people off opioids. When the brain has been abducted by the unnatural and indescribable need for opiates to flood their brains, it is difficult to think of or about anything else. The wake of destruction that can follow an addict’s actions can be immense: broken relationships and commitments, financial travesty, and deep shame. (more…)

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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