Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation

Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation is presented as both an influential source of the traditional twenty-eight-day rehabilitation model and an organization that began to adapt as evidence and practice around opioid treatment changed. In 2012, it started offering Suboxone to some patients, a limited but notable move toward medication-assisted treatment (MAT) amid the continuing dominance of abstinence-based programs.

Identity and Treatment Model

The book describes Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation as affiliated with the Betty Ford Center and credits it with originating the twenty-eight-day rehabilitation concept. That model is part of a broader treatment culture in which structured, time-limited rehabilitation and abstinence were prominent responses to addiction. The account does not detail the organization’s founding, governance, or the full range of its programs; its significance here lies in the model associated with it and its later treatment-policy shift.

Shift Toward Medication-Assisted Treatment

In 2012, Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation began offering Suboxone to some patients. Suboxone is used in medication-assisted treatment for opioid-use disorder, where medication is provided as part of a broader approach to treatment and recovery support. The change did not mean that the organization offered the medication to every patient, but it showed that a prominent institution associated with the established rehabilitation model was beginning to make room for medication-based care.

Place in the Wider Treatment Landscape

The book sets this adjustment against a treatment environment in which abstinence-based rehabilitation remained widespread. Jesse Bolstridge, for example, attended a Jacksonville program aimed at abstinence and was tapered off Suboxone after three weeks; the account does not identify that program as Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. The contrast illustrates the unevenness of treatment approaches rather than a direct connection between Jesse’s care and the organization.

The book also describes a growing institutional consensus in favor of longer-term maintenance medication, including agreement from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Institute of Medicine, the World Health Organization, and the White House drug czar’s office that indefinite maintenance could be superior to abstinence-based rehabilitation for opioid-use disorder. Against that background, Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation’s 2012 decision stands as a meaningful change in practice, while the limited wording—offering Suboxone to some patients—preserves the difference between adopting MAT and making it universal.