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  Advocates for Responsible Treatment - Southern California

Letter to White House Commission

To:        The White House Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and Opioid Crisis
            Governor Chris Christie
            Governor Charlie Baker
            Governor Roy Cooper
            Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy
            Professor Bertha Madras, PhD

Dear Commission Members,

Our family is writing to you from San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.  We understand that your preliminary report recommends rapidly expanding treatment capacity.  We would like to invite you to see what happens to a city when treatment capacity rapidly expands.  From our city’s perspective, the combination of the Mental Health Parity Act and the Affordable Care Act has already created a dramatic expansion.  In a city of only 35,000, we have 15 licensed treatment centers; we have 11 licensed detoxes, and we have dozens of unlicensed recovery residences where people live for just a few months while active in treatment.  This translates to multiple houses next to or in close proximity to each other, and sadly, many with repeated emergency calls to police and fire departments.  

Unfortunately, rapid expansion often means lower quality, and we see that, too.  Your plans to rapidly expand have the potential to harm the very people you want to help.  Recovering addicts need you to ensure the following:

1) All businesses operating in residential neighborhoods providing any kind of care to recovering addicts must be licensed to ensure they maintain sober environments promised to their tenants.

2) Cities need to be given the power to regulate residential recovery properties as the businesses they are, including inspecting them for over-crowding, which is a hazard to and abuse of the tenants.

3) All owners, operators and employees must be fingerprinted, background checked, held to certain standards, and urine tested to ensure that they are not contributing to their tenants’ struggles or trauma.

4) All businesses accepting recovering addicts into residential treatment should be required to collect a deposit that will ensure tenants can get home, whether they are kicked out or leave at the end of treatment. In Dana Point, "Orange County Sheriff's Department Lt. Russ Chilton, who is the city's police chief, (said) an increase in the number of sober-living homes in the area has created a pool of people who become homeless after they are evicted from the homes.”  The city of Costa Mesa has set up requirements to help ensure recovering addicts don’t end up homeless.  The onus should be on the business.

Science, money, advice from nonprofits, and recommendations are not enough to fix this crisis.  We strongly urge the commission to include as a full member either Florida State Attorney David Kronberg or Florida Rep. Lois Frankel, both of whom understand how the business of recovery actually works in practice.  

Sincerely,
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  • Home
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