The Behavioral Corner 

Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano. And this is the Behavioral Corner, you're invited to hang with us as we discuss the ways we live today, the choices we make, the things we do, and how they affect our health and well-being. So you're on the Corner, the Behavioral Corner, please hang around a while.

Steve Martorano 

Hey, everybody, how are you? Welcome back to the Behavioral Corner, me Your host and guide, Steve Martorano host and guide. It's easy to be a guide on the corner, you really don't have to go many places, which I love it. We are really pleased with this program and I'll tell you why. This is our 50th episode of the Behavioral Corner and we wanted to note that because well you know, be honest with you, we're kind of happy with the way it's working. Its building in the podcasting was a brave new world. For me. I'm an old warhorse from broadcasting but the podcast was a new deal. So a year ago, we got the pivot over to the wide world of podcasting. And none of it incidentally would have been possible without the tremendous support of our partners and underwriters Retreat Behavioral Health. I don't want to belabor this point. But they, as I say, not only provide the finances for this operation, but they provide their passion, their expertise, their people, their knowledge about behavioral health. And as I said, without whom, none of it would have been possible at all, we want to acknowledge that right up front, and welcome to the program. main guy, Peter Shor. Peter is the founder and CEO of Retreat Behavioral Health. And Peter and I are joined by his strong right arm. 

Peter Schorr 

He's left arm.

Steve Martorano 

His left arm -- Chief Operating Officer Ken Kosza. Hello, guys, and welcome to the 50th edition of the Behavioral Corner.

Peter Schorr 

Thank you for that wonderful introduction.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah, I do want to make an additional point. So people understand. I can't, I came to Retreat through Ken, who I knew from my previous life. And when I approached anybody about this idea for a show about substance abuse and treatment, it wasn't because I had any expertise in it but I ran into a bunch of guys who did. And I thought you know what, this radio program here, nobody's talking about this. And they weren't. So we launched it. Believe me, I believed in my bones. And I was never going to get anybody to do this with me. Because I kept saying to people, it can't be an infomercial. If it's about "Call this number right now will save your life." I don't want you to do it and Ken was first in line to go, "Not only do I understand but I got a guy that will absolutely believe in that." And that's what the best thing in addition to what you don't mind support, the best thing was that retreat and Peter and Ken buy into the idea is just to be informational and it has to be about people and informative so that, you know they stand ready to help you but they're not in, you know, in any way ever said, "We're the only people that can help you." So I'm totally grateful for that and I hope the audience is starting to understand that there are people like Retreat out there that can be trusted, and actually can help. They have grown over the 6, 7, 8 years now we've been together enormously, facilities in southern Florida. They are up in the Lancaster County area with an outpatient facility at a residential facility satellite offices of various places in the state of Pennsylvania, and Southern Connecticut as well, with the new facility up there. So are good people, they do good work. Peter, for me, the biggest change, I should say not really a change occurred within your business, when you didn't pivot so much but expand your portfolio services to include freestanding mental health treatment, at Retreat and they're in was born Synergy, which is your healthcare arm of Retreat. Tell me about synergy a little bit and why because you made this move well before the pandemic. But it now seems really forward-thinking because we have a mental health crisis, in addition to a substance abuse crisis. Why did you make that tip?

Peter Schorr 

Well, we've always treated the mental health aspect of it. We just weren't licensed for it. We didn't we couldn't build for it and get paid for it. But we believe that if we didn't really delve into what the patient's problems are, that just be a revolving door. A lot of times substance use disorder is a symptom of mental health. And we've seen that in our industry and Ken and I for -- I've been in a little longer than Ken but Ken's been a long time now too. He can't say he's a rookie anymore, that's for sure. 

Ken Kosza 

I can definitely say that in my 30s now. 

Peter Schorr 

Yeah, yeah, no, not even that you've been in the business a long time. You've seen we've seen changes. We've seen changes in patient profiles on how patients are these days, and we've seen a big spike in mental health. tissues. You know, first, we saw it in Florida, we, you know, just in our, in our meetings of our leadership team of how do we, you know, we see such a sicker population, the drugs are different. And that's really what caused a lot of it too. It's not like it was, you know, 30-40 years ago, where heroin was 15% purity. It got up to 85 90% purity before it changed altogether, and became something else. And it became something else called fentanyl that was brought in from China, that's killing everybody in our country. People know, if you have a, a, an addiction problem, and you know, that what you're doing can cause you to die -- that's a mental health issue. That's something we have to look like, Are you trying to kill yourself? Or is it something that you're doing on purpose? Or is it something you just have no control over? So having our Synergy program, and using the word "synergy" just meant a lot to us, because, you know, when you use the word synergy, a lot of things have to have synergy within itself. It's something that we thought was a great name for our program. It's taken off tenfold of what we thought it would be. We've increased our bed count, in both our facilities and Pennsylvania and Florida, like three or four times already, we've had to add more beds to the mental health side of it. You know, it's, it's a little different than then we're used to on dealing with addicts, where you're dealing with just a mental health issue, they don't even have addiction problems, a lot of people coming. You know, that they're there just for their mental health issues and it takes a lot of resources to do that. It takes a lot of folks who were there, you know, doing their daily jobs, but now they got to focus on sometimes a patient has to have a one on one the whole time they're there. So you know, we have to staff up for that, you know, we have to try to make it as safe as possible. You know, unfortunately, when you're dealing with mental health issues, you're dealing with a lot of despair, a lot of death, a lot of different things that get into the mix of it, and we have to be prepared for that we have to be ready for that we have to have a staff that understands that. You know, when we had staff before, you know, we're dealing with addiction problems. I mean, we also delve into the mental health issue, but not as we do now. So now, you know, a lot of questions staff asked when we were doing this is, you know, people are going to be tied up? We're not a lockdown psychiatric facility. That's not what we are. That's not what we intended to be. We intended to provide services for our patients that really need to go above and beyond the addiction piece and I think that we're doing a phenomenal job with that. And kind of, you know, seeing it on the inpatient side was one thing, but on the outpatient side is really where you make a big difference. And that's the reason is that the inpatient side, you're kind of at the mercy of the insurance company, how long is a patient going to stay, there could be five days, it could be 30 days, it could, whatever it is. But on the outpatient side, now, you really can get into some work, because they could be there for years, especially on the mental health side. You know, we have psychiatry staff. We do, M.A.T. -- medically assisted treatment. There's a lot of different aspects that go into an outpatient facility, now, when we have all these different services, not just substance use disorders, mental health services too, family counseling, there's a lot of components that go into it. And you said before, and where we never want to be an infomercial for Retreat. I think what we're doing is paving the way for other facilities to see what we're doing to make a difference. We want people to do what we're doing, we can't treat every person in the United States. And that's not our intention. Our intention is to do the best job we can do be a model. And then other facilities can see, well look what they're doing. Maybe we need to step it up a little and we can do a little better service for people because people are sick. You know, we haven't talked about the pandemic, but the pandemic has caused a lot of mental health issues, a lot of substance use disorder issues because people are home and stuff and get in their own heads and have nothing else to do. So the world has changed drastically in the last year and a couple of months, we've been going through a pandemic, but we started this before the pandemic. You know, and it's something that's taken off during it, but it's something that's going to be on when the pandemics over. This is something that's a very, very valuable and muted service for the community.

Steve Martorano 

It was an extraordinary move you guys made because I hear you when you say your staff out a whole lot of questions. And I'm sure the industry stood back and went, what are they kidding? They don't have their hands full enough with substance abuse people now they're going to treat mental health? It was just inspired and something that I'm sure he would have done without the pandemic that he said the pandemic has exacerbated that problem. For sure, Ken, with regard to expanding services to include that area, who were the people? Who are the stakeholders, someone like you had to convince that this is what we're going to do, and here's why we're going to do it? Who were they?

Ken Kosza 

Right? That's a good question. So for us, and you talked about it earlier, we're blessed to work for an organization that, from the top like Peter, they understand the climate of behavioral health care. Right? You're not speaking to some foreign bankers that don't understand where things are going are the trends that we're seeing what's happening in healthcare. So they're already in tune. So it's not rocket science to say when an 85 plus percentage of your patients have mental health issues, that this is something that we need to talk about. Right? If we want to provide the best care to these folks, how do we do that? Right? And then the question is, well, how do you treat folks that only have mental health or only have substance use and are not dually diagnosed? Because really, those end up becoming the forgotten patient. Right? If the folks that are, are just dealing with one or the other, the vast majority are dually diagnosed both on the mental health side and on the substance use disorder side. So this is the conversation with the key stakeholders, Peter, really to get him to understand what he already does that this is what's happening. Once you do that, then it's a conversation with key stakeholders within our organization. How prepared are we to do this and are we capable of getting it done? Right? You brought up the pandemic, on the flip side, the pandemic, we didn't get to have that conversation did we. We need to have the conversation to say, are we ready for telehealth? Are we ready for Zoom? Are we ready for all these changes? They just happen. So we're blessed that we are innovative in our approaches so that we're hoping one step ahead of things that do happen. So the key stakeholders are our medical directors, our directors of nursing, and the key clinical people within our system that we sit down with our psychologists and figure out what are we going to do here? How's this gonna work and what's the best approach to take clinically.

Steve Martorano 

The pandemic is really the backdrop against which we're going to discuss all this stuff because while it presented enormous challenges and some horrible consequences, there were opportunities...

Ken Kosza 

Absolutely.

Steve Martorano 

...to get better at what we all do. Peter, right, this and again, the risk of sounding like I'm blowing smoke here, I'm not. The people you have around you are hired, obviously for their professional expertise but you seem to be the kind of boss who looks for people that can think on their feet. You know, you never know where the next good ideas but I come from. So talking about hitting the ground running. One of the first questions I asked, in the dawn of the pandemic, occurred to me one day, well, this isn't strictly speaking something about substance abuse, but they have a facility where they're providing a health care service to a group of people under there, you know, what preparations are they making? I mean, how could they possibly have protocols? And you have one of my view, one of the great healthcare professionals working for you, Mellissa Callahan, your Chief of Nursing -- really was out front on this thing.

Peter Schorr 

Yeah, she definitely was, she was I mean, every day she had a health tip. You know, it feels -- I don't know about you Ken -- it feels like a different world than it was when it started. In a year ago, March. We've progressed a lot more than we'd let on to because Kenny and I are in Florida, Florida, we feel like there's never been COVID. We know what's going on in the world. I mean, we were not stupid, but it really has changed a lot. And we've really kind of progressed in at Retreat on how we've, you know, started when the COVID started. You know, when we first started, Ken will tell you, we, you know, we had an outpatient facility. Now you got to close outpatient, you can't have people coming in, what do you do? So in 24 hours, you start a virtual healthcare business. Patients still need to get treatment -- still need to be seen -- they still need to talk to people. So literally in 24 hours, we started a new business. We had no idea what we were doing it for. We didn't know what Zoom was. What the hell was Zoom? You know, an entity in itself, and now people are getting Zoom fatigue. You know, there are so many different aspects of it. There are positives...

Ken Kosza 

And opportunities have come in.

Peter Schorr 

But a year ago, before you open Connecticut, we talked about how we would utilize technology. You know, it's something that's important to grow as a company, number one, is how you're going to utilize technology. In our industry how do you use utilize technology? We didn't know two months later, we had to hit the floor running and have to understand technology a little better. You know, it's growing and growing and growing. But you know, that happens so quickly. And I think as an industry, not just Retreat, I'm gonna say as an industry, we really did a good job in understanding that we have to be quick. We can't sit back and wait for someone to tell us what to do. You got to do.

Steve Martorano 

Let me ask you about the technology because this is interesting to me. So yeah, hit the ground running. Who knows zoom? Who knows -- who knows telemedicine?

Peter Schorr 

We knew about Telemedicine.

Ken Kosza 

It's interesting that you say that, Steve. I think that that's a point where you said earlier or sometimes these difficult times create opportunities. We can have a whole nother meeting about billing codes and how they affect innovation in treatment. Right? There are awesome opportunities for access and that's really what all this comes down to. When you're fighting a pandemic, or an epidemic, or a mental health crisis it's about access and quick and efficient access. So there's been these opportunities that we've talked about even previously and all of the healthcare talks about and telemedicine is a thing. There are really key spots within a patient's life cycle where there's an opportunity to use virtual health to make a big impact. Right? And so it's kind of get put off until something happens where I have no choice.

Steve Martorano 

So so it's less a question if it didn't exist, but it was underutilized and not appreciated.

Peter Schorr 

Right. It was a growing industry, virtual health, but not what we do. Because ours is a little different. Ours, you know, on the individual counseling, you can do things like that. But you're talking about groups. You're talking about, you know, people having health and physicals online, I mean, there's a lot of different aspects of it, that we had to utilize that wasn't there before. And we've kind of like, tried to be innovative and saying like -- because I understand the concern -- the concerns are that if we have a group, and we're licensed in Pennsylvania, now someone comes from us from Indiana, they come to us, and then they go back home, and then they utilize our outpatient to virtual, it's not fair to the therapist that's in Indiana who's licensed in that state. And now they're not going to have access to a patient that's going to a different state that's not licensed in that state. That's not fair. And we understood that we see that. And we understand the concern. So as an industry as regulatory agencies, they got to figure out, how do we get -- this is the wave of the future. Someone who's stuck, who's not mobile can't move, you know, now, this is the way they can connect to a therapist. Someone who lives in a very rural area, but they do have Wi-Fi. This is something that they can connect to a therapist, it's something that really opens up a lot more mental health, counseling substitute to sort of counseling, a lot of different things in the medical field.

Steve Martorano 

It's remarkable, the more I read about the pandemic and the history of pandemics, I go back to this notion that is a great tragedy, great deaths but often the outcome of something like this can lead to something great, innovative, and tremendously helpful. So certainly, that's...

Ken Kosza 

We need urgency to make change. Right? We need urgency. We feel comfortable, complacent, we're not trying to change.

Steve Martorano 

And the great example I read was The Black Death, the bubonic plague of the 15th, I guess, century, killed a whole lot of people but the Renaissance followed. A flowering of everything. And it came out of the necessity of having to change because of this disease. So it's good to see that that's happening in behavioral health. I can speak personally on it as a communicator, one of the things that happened when we launched the podcast, under the banner of a behavioral health situation, a pandemic occurs, which affects literally every aspect of our lives. Suddenly the area that we could open up the show to we have some strange guests -- if you look at the list, you go what the hell does this have to do with behavioral health,

Ken Kosza 

Isn't it? Isn't that the whole point? So that's the point for the show since the beginning, Steve is that community is a conversation, and this idea that behavioral healthcare is supposed to be I think, in the psych hospital, that's like a three-mile long road to get to this beautiful old building, and it's hidden, and nobody knows what's there. And you think, is that an old ancient mansion? Or is that a psych hospital? Or what is it? Its conversation, its community, its engagement. It's every aspect of our life is affected by these issues. And I think the pandemic right has shown that to be true that you can't get away from behavioral health care. Mental health is so important and when it struggles, and you're not giving it the time, it's do look at the impact that has on our society. Even when there's a significant medical crisis happening.

Steve Martorano 

What we like to say around here is that a definition of behavioral health for the lay person, I think, is the decisions you make choices, the behavior you exhibit on a day to day basis has an impact on your mental, physical and spiritual well being. So we're going to talk about a lot of different people, a lot of things they do, and how it affects us all. And the pandemic has brought it all into incredibly sharp focus for us.

Peter Schorr 

We talked about the pandemic -- the difference between this pandemic and previous ones is how it gets broadcast throughout the world. And everyone knows about it. You know, any videos you see throughout the world, you see people wearing masks. It's a world problem, now. It's not just the United States. It's not just Russia. It's not just China. It's a world problem. We're all in this together. 

Steve Martorano 

Well, we see that very sharply with the situation in India, where, thank goodness, much of the rest of this country anyway is in at least the position to be able to turn to Indian say we were going to help you. That's enlightened self-interest because if it's people getting sick in India, they're going to get sick everywhere. So yeah, instantaneous information. It may be our salvation army. Out guests on this 50th episode of the Behavioral Corner, our good friends and partners from Retreat Behavioral Health, Peter Schorr, who is founder, CEO of Retreat Behavioral Health, and Ken Kosza, the Chief Operating Officer. We have more, we're going to talk about the Golden Age, unfortunately of depression in this country when we continue our conversation.

Synergy Health Programs 

Studies show that 2020 has negatively affected the mental health of millions of Americans. That is why at Retreat, we work to provide comprehensive mental health programming through our Synergy health programs. To learn more about Synergy and the comprehensive mental and behavioral health services we offer call us today at 855-802-6600.

Steve Martorano 

We interviewed an executive with the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team very early on in the pandemic. He was in lockdown. The teams weren't playing We didn't know whether he'd have sports. I thought, well, what affects people's emotional well being that I'm not gonna have any baseball? So we had John Brazier on and John was recording his end of this thing in his backyard. There were birds, you could hear the birds...

Ken Kosza 

I love that. Remember, I always wanted to have that after show when we were in the hive and we were talking to John Brown about sports.

Steve Martorano 

That's right. Let's talk about -- it's almost self-evident. If you know anything about substance abuse, it's an isolating disease, cuts people off from their families and healthy support systems and they wind up using the pandemic did that in spades, and resulted in the highest one year toll of overdoses. The number I have here is like 80 some thousand people, it's extraordinary. It's more people who died of substance abuse, overdoses than died on the nation's highways. And we know those reasons are self-obvious. The other big problem now, and I want to know whether you think it's actually a bigger problem, or for the same problem and we have a mental health crisis in this country. An enormous mental health crisis that affects everything we talk about that's problematic, certainly substance abuse. But when the arguments over guns come up, and the one side said, "Well, there's just too many guns." The other side says, "No, there are too many sick people." You can see where mental health touches it all. People have called it an epidemic of depression. Peter, you, must see lots of people on an outpatient basis, who are suffering from things like that. Are there other things that are depressing people at this point in history? Because it seems like everybody's depressed?

Peter Schorr 

Well, there's a lot of uncertainty, I think it's changed a little since the beginning of the pandemic, but there was so much uncertainty with economics, what was going on, and how many people would be losing their job. You know, it's very nice for the government to give stimulus checks of, you know, $1600 and $1400, every couple of months. But people go through that in a couple of days. You know, there's still a lot of uncertainty, and lot of uncertainty causes a lot of mental health issues. And that's something that's unfortunate, during a pandemic, where we don't know where we're going. I mean, now we have a little more direction so it's kind of easing back a little. But in the in the height of that we, there was no vaccine. We didn't know what was going to be. I mean, everyone's talking about if you get COVID, you're gonna die. Remember that? And now, you know, we know people, Kenny, and I know, people that COVID didn't even know they had it. You know, it's changed a lot, obviously, and we become stronger. You know, a good part of our population has been vaccinated. And, you know, we're starting to come out of this, you know, but it's still a long way to go, You read about some states that are as bad as it was when it first started.

Steve Martorano 

That's right,

Peter Schorr 

That's gonna cause again, the uncertainty and you're gonna see a big spike in overdoses and mental health issues. People that have overdosed and died that, like, we looked at each other and it's like, how did that happen? This person was doing so good. An older person, you know, in their 30s and 40s. What's going on? I mean, that's when you feel the take of what's happening. That's when you know, it's happening when you see an older person is overdosing from a fentanyl overdose, because of the pandemic that's going on.

Steve Martorano 

Ken we put a number, a tragic number on the number of people who have died from the virus. We know that many other people have died from ancillary issues that are directly resulted of that. Suicide rates are through the roof. You are familiar with the phrase, I've seen it so many articles, where they talk about "deaths of despair." So people just wake up with no apparent reason for feeling desperate and take their lives. It's not like that at all, is it?

Ken Kosza 

Now, what we've seen over the last few years, as Peter talked about, the fentanyl crisis is a real paradigm shift in terms of the impact that drugs have on the brain. Right? So you're seeing folks that are coming in now that have mental health issues, particularly depression, that may be try a substance or try, again, maybe it's Xanax, maybe it's an opioid, and then they end up either overdosing on fentanyl or something like that. That has a significant impact on the brain. So you're seeing more of these young folks, that the disease of despair is now becoming a disease of quick overdose due to depression. You're sent you're self medicating in the past, maybe you eventually got addicted to heroin, and that went on for 10 or 15 years. But now that Xanax is laced with fentanyl, or it is a fentanyl pill, it's not even laced. Or, you know, you just you were taking opioids, and that's where that went. So it is definitely a disease of process, a disease of time. And to treat it takes a very multifaceted approach. Right. You're working with psychiatry, you're working with counseling you're working with, like Peter said, higher levels of care, like IOP. You're working with things like dTMS machines - BrainsWay -- I think that you have had a session, have you had an episode on the BrainsWay?

Steve Martorano 

We haven't because I hadn't found the right person to talk to about it. 

Ken Kosza 

Oh, no! Yeah, we need to -- maybe it's Dr. Klotz? We have a handful of folks that are really understand this, the function of this service very well. But effectively, what it does is it's a slight restructuring of the brain through an MRI-like magnetic pulse that affects the brain and gets the the blood flow going and increases your glucose metabolism rates and things like that to trigger the brain. We've had a handful of folks use it and we see really good outcomes and BrainsWay as a whole has had really good outcomes to treat depression. But it's dTMS, which stands for deep transcranial magnetic stimulation -- dTMS.

Steve Martorano 

These are micro doses of electric shock.

Ken Kosza 

So basically, what is an MRI strength, magnetic pulse? So it's a machine, it hooks up to your brain. And it provides like this MRI strength magnetic pulse that goes through the helmet, and then fires certain neurons in the brain. And what makes the d TMS technology different than the TMS is that it goes deeper into the brain, which reduces the amount of human user error. So when you're setting up the machine, the outcomes of TMS are really strong, if you actually hit the part of the brain that is functioning. Right? If you miss it, it doesn't work. So if you get to the place where the problem is, you see really good outcomes. And at this point, typically insurance pays for that if you've had several failed attempts of medication. So this is somebody that you talked about, that has the diseases of despair, maybe they've had chronic depression, and they just never been able to kick it. Maybe they've had a psych hospital stay or not, but they may never have even gotten that significant or severe. They've just dealt with depression. And they've tried counseling, they tried psychiatry, they've tried medicine, nothing really works. This has shown really good outcomes for those folks to kind of get another shot at something different. And again, the dTMS component is what makes it a little bit more unique in that it goes deeper and decreases the likelihood of user error.

Steve Martorano 

I want to follow up with you on that and find somebody.

Ken Kosza 

Let's have another episode on that. But it's another way to treat depression.

Steve Martorano 

Peter, let me ask you -- you've been at this a long time, man, and boy you've seen a lot of changes. What's the most significant change you've seen in the area of your expertise -- behavior health (and) substance abuse? What has really shifted in terms of people's thinking or procedures?

Peter Schorr 

I think and Ken touched on was the introduction of fentanyl into this country. At first, it was a replacement for people who were doing heroin. Which it's another opiate and people were using that they were understood that there was an opiate, there was a chance of them overdosing and, and things like that. But now it's worked its way into almost every single aspect of every drug there is. As Kenny said, it's put in Xanax pills. It's put in cocaine. It's putt marijuana. It's everywhere.

Steve Martorano 

Does fentanyl actually have a medicinal purpose?

Peter Schorr 

Fentanyl was used as a pain medication for people suffering from cancer, from all these inoperable diseases they have and things that they've been used forever.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah, yeah. But you're I mean, I've been reading those stories as well, which I was shocked to find out. I understood that the sources of illicit drugs thought "Oh, look at this, we can we can spike our cheaper stuff with this." And actually, the results are obvious, I had no idea that somebody's buying, you know, a valium...

Ken Kosza 

Xanax. Very common in Xanax.

Peter Schorr 

Like two months ago, I had someone working in my house and they left and they went to go to a neighbor's house. And I was just about to leave my house. I was getting in my car to drive. And my neighbor called me over and said, "You better get here quick." I go why? And I get there and this electrician's helper was in distress. When I got there he laid on the ground and went blue - stop breathing. I started CPR on him. I didn't know what he took. You know, I did CPR for 11 minutes before the.. well the police came and just watched me do CPR. But when the EMS came they had to give him Narcan. He thought he was taking cocaine.

Steve Martorano 

My guess is that when people think they're buying a benzodiazepine for a legitimate reason, and it winds up being cut with fentanyl, they didn't get that from CVS or Walmart. They're buying drugs online? 

Peter Schorr 

They're buying it for legitimate reason and not buying it off the street and fentanyl is going to be in it.

Steve Martorano 

But that's where they get it online. They get it online, right?

Ken Kosza 

Yeah. They can also buy -- they can be buying from a friend. I mean, there are all different ways.

Peter Schorr 

And that's happened.

Ken Kosza 

Yeah, it's a scary proposition. Right? We could have a whole series on the scary proposition that is the fentanyl situation. It's not even a drug crisis, the fentanyl situation that we have in our country right now that is... If you really think it all through, right, you're talking about a major conversation, if it ever went beyond drugs. Right?

Peter Schorr 

And it's gotten into everything.

Steve Martorano 

Well, I mean, I hate use the phrase sounds so pointy headed, but there are geopolitical considerations here. 

Ken Kosza 

Absolutely. What I'm saying you could go anywhere, Steve. Think about it, if you're pulling somebody over and they and you see these numbers, and we get desensitized to it, where they have enough fentanyl on them to kill 10 million people. And we don't even like let that kind of sink again, that what are we saying right now? There's be a lot of cocaine to be able to get to that... There's be a lot of heroin to get to the number.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah.

Ken Kosza 

You know, in our minds, it's because it's been used on the illicit drug scene and it's like you said, they're cutting it in, but they're not cutting it the way a pharmaceutical company is cutting, they're just taking a big pile mixing into a pile mixing the pot, so you don't know what you're getting. But obviously, that's a from a public safety situation it's fascinating.

Steve Martorano 

We better get in front of it, immediately.

Ken Kosza 

Get it out of the country. 

Steve Martorano 

It's one thing to have these gigantic conferences where trade representatives get together and argue over tariffs and who's bringing more steal in and taking less steal out. Somebody ought to stand up and go, "Listen, you won't do any business with us? Get that stuff from getting over here. We'll hold our end up, you got to hold up your end." That's long overdue. I'm going to let you guys go. You're busy and we have to put your show together because we want it to run to coincide with exactly our 50th program. Again, you know how I feel -- you guys have been the best. You know, you gave us the mandate. We're working like crazy and loving it. This has been a real education for me, boy, the social media world was foreign to me. I learned more about it every day. I hope you guys appreciate the show. We're proud of it. We're proud of our partners with the people we've had. We thank you so very much for your support. Appreciate the hell out of it.

Peter Schorr 

We're proud of what you're doing. Steve, we're proud that you're here, you know, you're getting the word out there. You're getting guests that are informative. People are learning about not only the disease of addiction but many, many different topics. Because a lot of them just band together at the end of the day anyway. But you're doing a great job getting the people to talk about what's going on. 

Steve Martorano 

I mean, thank you, but you did me a favor. I said I've been in broadcasting for a long time. When I decided I still wanted to do something. I thought well, I don't want to talk about that anymore. I sure don't want to talk about that anymore. There must be something worth talking about and I found it. Unfortunately in people's sorrows about substance abuse. But you know, you guys and the people that help them open up a whole new world for me. I learned every day. I learned something new every day. Peter Schorr CEO Retreat and Ken Kosza, Chief Operating Officer. Thank you, guys. 

Ken Kosza 

Thanks, Steve. Take care, everybody.

Steve Martorano 

See y'all next time. Don't forget you're supposed to you know the deal you follow us and you're like us and you don't really need nobody likes critics. Okay? But having said that is a function where you can review this program on iTunes. That's a big deal. And you know, I'm tough, you know, my skin is pretty thick. Tell us what you think of the Behavioral Corner. What you'd like to hear what you don't want to hear any more of that would be very, very helpful. And we'll look for you next time on the Corner. Take care.

The Behavioral Corner 

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