Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the countryâs failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry.
Our countryâs leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before. So why isnât it working? The answer is that in Americaâwhere anyone can get addictedâonly certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths, our default response is still to punish, while rehabs across the United States fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and exploit patients. Weâve heard a great deal about the opioid crisis foisted on America by Big Pharma, but weâve heard too little about the other half of this epidemicâthe reason why so many remain mired in addiction. Until now.
In this book, youâll find the stories of four people who represent the failures of the rehab-industrial complex, and the ways our treatment system often prevents recovery. April is a black mom in Philadelphia, who witnessed firsthand how the governmentâs punitive response to the crack epidemic impeded her own motherâs recoveryâand then her own. Chris, a young middle-class white man from Louisiana, received more opportunities in his addiction than April, including the chance to go to treatment instead of prison. Yet the only program the judge permitted was one that forced him to perform unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies. Wendy is a mother from a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, whose son died in a sober living home. She began investigating for-profit treatment programsâyet law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored her warnings, allowing rehab patients to die, again and again. Larry is a surgeon who himself struggled with addiction, who would eventually become one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Together, these four stories illustrate the pitfalls of a system that not only fails to meet the needs of people with addiction, but actively benefits from maintaining their lower status. They also offer insight into how we might fix that system and save lives.