California’s low-level regulation of addiction treatment and rehabilitation facilities that make it almost impossible to properly track them is under scrutiny as the state auditor’s office embarks on an audit of the Department of Health Care Services.
The audit, requested by Assemblymember Diane Dixon, R-Newport Beach, will “determine if DHCS is properly licensing, regulating and enforcing state laws” regarding residential facilities that provide nonmedical recovery, treatment and detoxification service.
“It is regrettable how much these facilities are taking advantage of vulnerable people — people who actually need help,” Dixon said. “Unfortunately, these facilities advertise treatment for alcohol or drug abuse recovery or treatment services and more often than not provide limited care. We need more accountability on who is licensed and if the treatment programs provided are effective.”
The audit requests information on how DHCS is licensing and enforcing laws on facilities that provide “24-hour nonmedical, residential, alcoholism or drug abuse recovery or treatment services to adults,” according to Dixon’s office.
In 2021, a man from Gratitude Lodge, a detox house in Newport Beach, forced his way into a house in the corner of Santa Ana Heights where he was shot and killed by an occupant of the home. The man, 23-year-old Henry Richard Lehr, had been exhibiting signs of paranoid delirium — screaming about wanting to leave, being chased and wanting to go home.
The Southern California News Group has spent years probing deaths, sexual assaults, drug use and illegal paying-for-patients in California’s loosely regulated problem-prone addiction treatment industry, dubbed the Rehab Riviera. More than half of California’s state-licensed and/or certified addiction treatment facilities are in just four counties — Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino — and these are expressly non-medical facilities that are often poorly…
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