Hey, Gov. Newsom! Hope you’re doing well up there.
For us? Down here, you know, not so much.
I can’t believe it but it has been six years since the Southern California News Group began chronicling the tragic cycle of fraud, death, abuse and abject failure in California’s startlingly unregulated addiction treatment industry. In that time, not much has changed.
You have kids, Gov. Newsom. Can you imagine taking a lost, troubled child to a fancy seaside treatment center — licensed by our state — promising medical supervision and group therapy and a new lease on life, only to learn that the kid died in his sleep because there’s no doctor for miles and no one was checking as he detoxed?
Or because he got hold of drugs packed with fentanyl and overdosed in his room?
Or because he was tossed out for being high and staggered alone to a nearby parking lot and swallowed the rest of the pills in his pocket, dying behind a gas station garbage bin?
I’m a parent, too, Gov. Newsom. If I speak to one more mother or father shattered by this tragedy, whose heart is crushed and pureed with guilt and regret and what-ifs and if-onlys, I may tear all my hair out. You need to hear these parents. You need to do something. Not to expand the system, as some of your proposals to address addiction and homelessness might, but to completely and totally change how the corrupted, private-pay, insurance money-fueled segment of the addiction treatment system works in California.
In case you missed it, the U.S. Department of Justice recently proclaimed Orange County the nation’s epicenter for addiction treatment fraud. Bully for us.
We were so optimistic after publishing “Rehab Riviera” back in 2017. There were hearings in Congress and the state Legislature. There were investigations and arrests and imprisonments and vows to remake the system to better protect vulnerable people exploited to make a buck.
Myriad new laws were passed in Sacramento; some were signed by…
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