“Like slavery”: Rehab patients forced into unpaid labor to cover “treatment”

Enlarge / A heroin addict at a rehab house. (credit: Getty | AFP)

If you caught John Oliver's Last Week Tonight this past Sunday, you saw a lengthy segment detailing the atrocities of the rehabilitation industry. As Oliver pointed out, it's largely an unregulated, unstandardized market rife with bad actors, scams, and bunkum that offers little help to patients desperate to recover from deadly addictions. With some charging tens of thousands of dollars for a month of treatment, rehab facilities often rely on therapies with little evidence of efficacy-such as horse petting-and report largely made-up percentages for their success rates.

Even experts in the field find themselves at a loss for how to identify effective, quality facilities. The result is that many patients pay large sums only to go on to struggle with or die from their condition. And these devastating consequences are only heightened by the country's current epidemic of opioid addiction.

While Oliver gave a skillful overview of some of the rampant problems, an ongoing investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting picked out a particularly egregious case this week-Recovery Connections Community, a rehabilitation program outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

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