Haven for recovering addicts profits from relapses

Florida

IN Florida, heroin overdoses long ago elbowed out car crashes and routine health issues as the most common medical emergencies. Last year, Delray Beach Fire-Rescue paramedics responded to 748 overdose calls, 65 ended in deaths. Palm Beach County dealt with 5,000 overdose calls.

Unlike other places in the US that have been clobbered by the opioid crisis, most of the young people who overdose in Delray Beach are not from Florida. They are visitors, mostly from the Northeast and Midwest, and they come for opioid addiction treatment and recovery help to a town that has long been hailed as a lifeline for substance abusers.

But what many of these addicts find in Florida today is a crippled and dangerous system, fuelled in the past three years by insurance fraud, abuse, minimal oversight and lax laws. The result in Palm Beach County has been the rapid proliferation of troubled treatment centres, labs and group homes where unknowin…