Who We Are

Turning Point Clinic was created because the City of Baltimore desperately needed more substance abuse treatment capacity. Before Turning Point, there was no methadone clinic in East Baltimore, except for a small program run by Johns Hopkins.

Branded as “The heroin capital of America” by the national media, Baltimore was reported as having an estimated 60,000 heroin addicts. It was high time, then, for someone to bring more help, hope and healing to the addicts, the Community, the Family and the Taxpayer.
Turning Point was opened in April of 2003, a grassroots effort initiated by Rev. Milton Emanuel Williams, Jr. and the parishioners of his New Life Evangelical Baptist Church with the vision that this treatment center would be different. Not only would it be big, to address the community’s needs, the Clinic would also provide new approaches and program practices that would encourage more addicts to enter treatment while, at the same time, building new pathways to recovery that would encourage patients to stay in treatment. Since then, Turning Point has grown to be the largest opiate treatment clinic in the world, treating over 2,500 patients every day, and more than 10,000 since its inception. As envisioned from its very beginning, Turning Point has lived up to its promise that, “The Way Back Starts Here” by successfully guiding an ever-increasing number of heroin addicts toward a drug free life.

As a front line leader in the battle against heroin addiction, Turning Point was the first methadone treatment center to address fully the fact that a lengthy admission process is cripplingly counter- productive to a clinic’s success. It is a hard fact of life for those individuals struggling in the grip of heroin addiction, and experiencing the living nightmare of withdrawal, that they won’t, and really can’t, wait for the relief treatment can offer. Turning Point pioneered a revolutionary way to solve that problem.

In 2011 Turning Point launched the first “Open Access” program in the treatment field, reducing the time it takes for a patient to gain admission to treatment from weeks to less than a day. By doing this, Turning Point was able to more than double our patient population in less than one year.

It has always been Tuning Point Clinic’s vision that we can and will do even more to bring hope and healing to those among us trapped in the evil grip of drug addiction. It is time, high time, to move forward in this heroin war. We have added a research component to track results patient progress, while also helping in our unending quest to offer even more ways back to a drug free life. New and remodeled buildings will be soon be added to Turning Point’s growing health care campus development project which will immediately increase the number of patients we can admit for treatment and counseling. But that is just the beginning of the Turning Point of Tomorrow. The future holds promise for our introduction of even more innovative programs and procedures designed to save both lives and tax dollars.