Treatment industry needs fixing, say state lawmakers
Scores of people filled the council chambers to explore the holes in California’s regulation of the addiction treatment industry and chart a path to better protect patients, and preserve the peace in neighborhoods around treatment facilities and sober living homes.
There was the personal. Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Fullerton, told of her brother, who suffered from alcoholism and died last year.
Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley spoke of alcoholic relatives, and how her mother got sober with the help of Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara while Foley was still a teen.
Southern California remains ground zero of the Rehab Riviera, with nearly 1,000 of California’s 1,800 licensed or certified addiction treatment facilities clustered in just four counties: Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino.
The Orange County Register and Southern California News Group have chronicled reports of deaths, sexual assault, drug abuse and paying for rehab patients. Those reports have prompted federal probes, an Orange County task force, a sober living registry and new state laws designed to protect vulnerable people struggling with addiction. But speakers at the Costa Mesa hearing said that’s not enough.
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