LegitScript was scheduled this week to attend and speak at the Treatment Center Investment & Valuation Retreat in Scottsdale, Arizona. This national conference, which is organized by The Institute for the Advancement of Behavioral Healthcare, brings together owners and senior executives from the addiction treatment and recovery community to meet with key members of the investment and financial community.
We made the decision to withdraw from the conference, and I wanted to explain why in this blog. Over the last few weeks, we've received some threatening or confrontational communications from certification applicants. Some of these have been directed to our proper corporate email address, but in other cases, our staff has been contacted directly on their personal social media accounts. The threatening communications were made by more than one company or individual attending the conference, and in some cases indicated that if our staff did not take certain actions with respect to their applications, that the conference would be uncomfortable or confrontational. Accordingly, we made the decision to withdraw our presenter from the conference schedule. LegitScript's priority is to the safety and wellbeing of our employees, and not attending the conference in this case was the right call in the interests of the safety and security of our staff.
While it's unfortunate that some applicants have behaved aggressively or made demands or threats, I do want to emphasize that the vast majority of applicants have been professional, courteous, and a pleasure to work with. Going forward, LegitScript reserves the right to permanently deny the application of any applicant that engages in threatening behavior against our staff.
I also want to emphasize that this was not the fault of the Institute for the Advancement of Behavioral Healthcare, which plays an important role in furthering the discussion of addiction treatment by serving as a leading educational resource for behavioral healthcare professionals and allied stakeholders. We were looking forward to attending the retreat, meeting conference attendees, and sharing the ways in which LegitScript certification is helping to clean up the online advertising space for addiction treatment.
We're grateful to the conference organizers for inviting us to attend this retreat and for working hard to accommodate this situation. We appreciate the effort they have gone through to set up this conference, and we value the ongoing dialogue they foster around improving the addition treatment space. Our hope is to attend a future conference.
