Shoshana Walter first learned about the shameful state of the country’s rehab centers as a reporter at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit based in San Francisco. In 2017, she started hearing about patients in rehab facilities being sent out to dangerous, unpaid jobs at zoos, chicken-processing plants, nursing homes, and construction sites, all under the guise of addiction treatment. “There was one program that was founded by a cotton plantation owner who was putting rehab participants to work on his own plantation in Georgia,” she says. “It made me want to understand how on earth these programs could be considered treatment in this day and age.”
The following year, Walter was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist alongside reporter Amy Julia Harris for their series of articles on the subject. In Rehab: An American Scandal, which places particular emphasis on court-ordered rehab and sober-living facilities, Walter expands the story’s size and scope, focusing on four individuals from across the country who were betrayed by the nation’s drug treatment system. There’s April Lee, a Black teen in Philadelphia whose mother became a victim of the government’s racist and punitive approach to the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s, and Chris Koon, a white middle-class meth addict from Louisiana whose court-ordered rehab involved working up to 80 hours a week at chemical plants and grain silos, where he was paid with packs of cigarettes. Then there’s Larry Ley, a surgeon in Indiana targeted by the Drug Enforcement Administration for prescribing Suboxone, a medication for opioid addiction, to his patients, and Wendy McEntyre, a mom from Southern California who became a fierce advocate for rehab reform after her son, Jarrod, overdosed in a sober-living home.
McEntyre’s case is emblematic of many of the worst failings of this country’s handling of the opioid epidemic. During its height, when the crisis was hitting well-to-do families in suburban neighborhoods, there was a shift in focus away from vilification and stiff sentences to compassion and medical treatment. When the Affordable Care Act expanded benefits to include coverage for rehab services, for-profit facilities with little or no oversight popped up everywhere, many of them in California, already the mecca for celebrity rehabs like the Betty Ford Center and Malibu’s Promises (now Cliffside Malibu). McEntyre hoped to get her son into court-ordered rehab after he was arrested for stealing a motorcycle, but the judge instead sent him to a sober-living home. As Walter reports, these places are largely unlicensed and unregulated and offer little in the way of treatment—they’re places you’re supposed to go to after rehab. “There’s not a lot of qualifications you need to have in order to start a rehab program,” Walter says when we speak over Zoom. “And for sober-living homes, they’re often run by people whose only qualification is that they had an addiction previously themselves.”
When McEntyre’s son overdosed in 2004, no one at the sober-living home called her to offer their condolences; Jarrod’s sponsor, Rick Schoonover, didn’t attend her son’s funeral, he told McEntyre, because Jarrod “died loaded.” The grieving mom took it upon herself to fight the system. At Above It All, a rehab center near Lake Arrowhead, California, where another patient had died under mysterious circumstances, McEntyre began conducting surveillance on the facility and sent scores of angry emails and surveillance photos of the facility to state regulators. Above It All ultimately filed a restraining order against her after she sent out mass emails calling the owner a murderer and left a voicemail for the owner’s daughter saying, “I’m coming for you.”
Walter met McEntyre in 2020 and spoke with her regularly over the next five years. “Wendy is an extremely passionate person who really feels for every family she encounters who has struggled with addiction,” says Walter. “But sometimes she takes it a little too far. There were definitely periods where rehab owners were calling her crazy and mentally unstable. But she was trying to expose harm that they were causing. Her methods might be very aggressive at times, but her heart has always been in the right place.”
In the end, Above It All shuttered, its wrongful death lawsuits settled out of court. But other rehab centers and sober-living homes across the country continue to operate mostly without regulations. A series of cuts in grants and services on the federal level have worsened the situation, endangering many treatment programs and reducing access to treatment of any kind for many. The cuts, says Walter, reflect a shift away from the more compassionate approach to drug treatment reflected by the Affordable Care Act. “I think there’s this idea that politicians and policy leaders have accepted the notion of addiction as a disease that deserves medical treatment. But that’s not where we are in the United States. A lot of people are still routed through these really punitive systems.”
“If there’s anything I’ve learned about our treatment system, it’s that it is essentially run by these twin principles of punishment and profit,” she says. “People are punished for having addictions, and then these rehab programs proliferated with the intent of making a ton of profit off of them. And that’s how a lot of our systems in this country operate.”•
Robert Ito is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He writes about film, television, and theater for the New York Times.
