As the founder of multiple addiction treatment programs in Colorado, Cortland Mathers-Suter knows exactly what his clients experience and he has spent his career seeking to provide wrap-around care for those suffering from addiction. At 15, his life became consumed by drug and alcohol dependence. By 23, Mathers-Suter was facing incarceration, life threatening health problems and a mind that had fully departed from reality, he said.
A slew of bad decisions led me to face some very real and drastic consequences, but I was given a chance to get help instead, Mathers-Suter said. Although he said the 27 months of treatment in what was believed to be a therapeutic community in the Arizona desert was traumatizing, he left treatment healthy, safe and sober.
While at the program, I became obsessive with ethics in behavioral health and in particular, addiction treatment, he said. Mathers-Suter said he struggled with the realities of unethical and destructive programs and the people associated with such programs who take advantage of their positions.
His personal experience led him to seek a career in social work (he holds a Masters in Social Work) and social policy, working closely with private addiction treatment facilities. In 2015, he opened AspenRidge Recovery, but did not stop there. In 2017, Mathers-Suter founded found AspenRidge North in Fort Collins, followed by helping to start Denver Womens Recovery. He is now fully consumed by his latest project, Colorado Medication Assisted Recovery.
Mathers-Suter said that as a leader he believes that you get exactly what you put into everything. That is why he has worked every aspect of his business from taking out the trash to patient billing.
Moving forward, his goal is to make Colorado Medication Assisted Recovery (or CMAR) the gold standard of opioid-specific addiction recovery. That is why Mathers-Suter is developing Colorados first private program that integrates medication assisted treatment into outpatient addiction counseling, to provide fully wrap-around care for those suffering from the opioid epidemic. In the next five years, his goal is to expand CMAR to be the most extensive and expansive private addiction service nationwide for anyone who needs extended care treatment, outpatient programming or a more medically-oriented approach such as Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT).
The truth is that addicts, just like everyone else, want a comfortable and safe place where they can receive the care they need and deserve, he said. Because of his commitment and success in building, optimizing and selling businesses that provide essential needs in and around the addiction treatment space, Mathers-Suter has been named as a Titan of industry.
