Dear Gov. Newsom: People are dying in the Rehab Riviera. Do something

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 then-Gov. Brown and some were signed by you.

But, as it turns out, they just nibble around the edges. They simply don’t address the structural issues of a colossal problem that, frankly, is killing people. It also syphons billions of dollars from our health care system.

“Nothing is changing. Nothing is improving,” fumed Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris at a hearing with California’s addiction treatment regulators a little more than a year ago.

“This industry is learning they can do whatever the hell they want and you’ll write them a fix-it ticket. At some point, the blood of these kids is not just on the hands of these horrible operators, but on your hands as well.”

It’s on your hands, too, Gov. Newsom. You take on Big Oil, climate change, the housing shortage. Yet one bill that arguably could have brought tremendous change to the addiction industry — requiring outpatient centers, where the majority of treatment happens, to be state–licensed and meet minimum standards — you vetoed.

“I am supportive of the Legislature’s intent to license all SUD (substance use disorder) recovery and treatment services,” you wrote. “However, developing a new licensing schema is a significant undertaking…. It is clear that a substantial amount of work is still needed to develop a program that my administration can implement.”

That was more than three years ago. Where is this work? Where is this new schema? Granted, we had a little global pandemic between then and now; folks were busy. But the fact remains that even though I possess no credentials in health care I can still legally hang a shingle and open my own outpatient addiction treatment center and bill insurers thousands of dollars per person per day — and that should terrify us all.

Folks with long, scary rap sheets can and do open rehabs and work in them, too, because you still don’t require criminal background checks.

And please understand that the detox phase is the most dangerous and medically fraught stage of addiction treatment. That’s when folks are coming down off drugs and/or alcohol and are vulnerable to heart attacks, organ failure, seizures, delirium. Because of the grave danger, other states require detox to happen only under real medical supervision by real medical professionals. Yet here in California, you allow detox to happen in expressly non-medical residential rehabs, many of them six-bed tract houses in the middle of suburban neighborhoods, where the most one can hope for is a vocational nurse trained in CPR.

People are dying, Gov. Newsom. Death complaints in state-licensed addiction treatment centers have tripled over the last decade. Tripled. And that doesn’t count the folks dying in unlicensed programs that are completely unsupervised by the state. Like mine would be, if I ran an outpatient center.

So, over the coming months, we at SCNG will be telling you about folks like Frankie Taylor, found dead in his closet at a licensed Anaheim treatment center from an overdose, and how no one has felt compelled to track down how he got the deadly drugs or those who sold it to him. Except his parents.

We’ll be telling you about the New Jersey parents who come to Los Angeles every few months to try to convince their daughter, brokered from rehab to rehab and now living on the streets smoking fentanyl in plain sight, to please, please, please come home.

We’ll be telling you about how new laws aiming to address the mess are actually playing out — some largely ignored because there’s no real enforcement anyway.

Not all of these folks are kids of course, though many of them are, for reasons we’ll explain. We aim to present the problems in bite-sized bits that will reveal tragic patterns and spur you to action. There has never been a better time: California is set to get more than $2 billion in opioid settlement money that’s supposed to spent fighting addiction. And you, Gov. Newsom, are trying to reform our system and readying an initiative for the 2024 ballot “to build state of the art mental health treatment campuses to house Californians with mental illness and substance use disorders.” That would invest billions more public dollars into this sphere.

Please, let’s spend it on programs that work. It could be my kid someday, Gov. Newsom. It could be yours.