Desert Mountain Healing offers a different kind of addiction treatment

Sean Roberts and Gary Gamboa have seen more than 200 clients since opening Desert Mountain Healing, a drug and alcohol addiction treatment, in April 2022. Sadly, there’s still more people who need their services.

Desert Mountain, located next to Elevate on Southern Blvd., is an intensive outpatient drug and alcohol treatment program. It’s an alternative to inpatient that typically offers nine hours of treatment per week.

“One of the things we really like about the IOP model is that when you’re in any inpatient treatment, you’re in this nice safe bubble and everything’s good. But the moment you get out, you’re thrown back into your life. Here you have to learn how to incorporate sobriety into your day-to-day life, because you’re only here, like, nine hours a week,” Roberts said. “I think a lot of advantages to IOP are like, say, a single mom with kids, they can’t really leave to California for six months to go to rehab. So they can come to a place like this and can be here during the day and then they can go home at night and be with their kids. Also people who are functioning alcoholics and addicts and still have jobs — in which we have a percentage of those — the nice thing is, you know, they don’t have to take time off of their job. They don’t have to give up. They don’t even have to necessarily notify their job because if you’re going inpatient treatment, you’re asking from 30 to 60 days off work, you got to let them know why you’re gonna be off work.”

Roberts and Gamboa met about nine years ago in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and became friends. Roberts had been working in the addiction treatment field and wanted to try something different than inpatient treatment. A few months later, they opened Desert Mountain Healing IOP.

Gamboa made a presentation at the June 28 Sandoval County Commission meeting to explain what Desert Mountain Healing does for the community and ask for help for funding to expand the services offered.

“I’m not sure what exactly funding would look but, obviously, the more people we can get through the program, the better it benefits the community,” Gamboa said. “One in 10 people who want to get help are not able to get in a rehab. For whatever reason, you know, there’s a million different reasons, there’s no space. We get calls every day from all over the city that Albuquerque and Farmington, that nobody has space. I just want to help people get get sober and get clean. A regular walk-in client is there for 30 days; that 30-day stint is about $1,000 in cost. I guess my ask would be to consider funding for Desert Mountain so we can reach more clients out there that are addicted to drugs and alcohol.”

Commissioners Jay Block, Michael Meek and Joshua Jones and Chair Dave Heil shared experiences of addiction impacting their lives and expressed interest in helping to get some money from the county flowing into Desert Mountain.

“Unfortunately, this touches everybody. Whether it’s Black, white, Hispanic, Native American, rich, poor, young, old, unemployed, employed. It’s touched my family, unfortunately, as well, watching my mother both go through that,” Block said. “So I’ll talk to the county manager, see if there’s something we can do. I really appreciate what you do. I honestly, Gary, I would love for you to be unemployed. I would love for you to be out of business. Unfortunately, we get so many damn drugs poisoning our country, and we’re not doing a damn thing about it. It just really pisses me off seeing so many people ruin their lives. And I appreciate what you guys do.”

After Gamboa talked about the dangers of drugs in 2023, specifically fentanyl, Block pointed at the four Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office deputies in the room and said: “Look at these four heroes right here in the room here, and they’re in danger every single day when they go out on patrol because they deal with someone with fentanyl, and that touches them. Our law enforcement can get exposed to fentanyl and die or get injured, so I wish we could just kill every single drug dealer. That would make this country better.”

Roberts and Gamboa agree that fentanyl is a major problem that they’re using technology to solve.

“I would say probably 60% of our clients are fentanyl patients. We do what’s called a MAT program, which is medication-assisted treatment. We are, as far as I’m aware, the only IOP in the state with a with a medical doctor on board, and our doctor does typically suboxone therapy form, which works really well for addicts,” Roberts said. “The old thing that all of us alcoholics and potheads and meth eads and crackheads grew up with was absolute absence from everything. You get off it, you get completely clean. That doesn’t work for the fentanyl addicts. The obsession is so strong that for two years, they’re just not in a safe place. So we do a a two-year suboxone titrate to help get them through. I know there’s a lot of misunderstanding about suboxone and people think people aren’t sober, but it really takes two years for the receivers in their brain to reset and not just crave that so much.”

It’s not just a different way of treating patients at Desert Mountain; it’s also different people treating them.

“The biggest impact I think our place has is the different feel from the start when you walk in. Every one of our providers is very client-centered in how we approach them,” Roberts said. “It’s developing that personal connection. Every person who works here, including myself and Gary, we all are recovering addicts or alcoholics. So we all understand what it’s like to be in that position. And that’s a big change because not not all providers have all their staff that way. And that’s one thing we’ve worked hard to do.”

Should the funding come through, Desert Mountain plans to expand its services.

“Our future plans are to to do a detox home. We want to a home that’s big enough to handle 10 people,” Gamboa said. “Right now, if a client comes in, and they’re still either high or what have you, we have to farm that detox out. But we want to bring a detox home in under our umbrella of our own and then they’ll just go go to the to the IOP after that. I’m really wanting to do that by the end of next year. I want to add grief counseling to our services, family counseling, the detox thing.”

For now, Roberts and Gamboa will keep doing what they love: helping people.