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By Brenda Flanagan
Nicole DiMaria says her late sister Georgine’s struggle to find treatment dragged their family down a dark rabbit hole into the addiction recovery industry, a business she says prioritized profit over patients. DiMaria, who testified before the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation about her family’s nightmare, welcomes the agency’s call for reforms in its just-released report, “The Dirty Business Behind Getting Clean: Fraud, Ethical Misconduct and Corruption in the Addiction Rehabilitation Industry.”
“We have these criminals hiding in plain sight that they should be going after,” said Elissa Tierney, who’s in recovery. The lead community organizer for Not One More, she said she recognizes the abuses outlined in the SCI report, which said, “Fraud, unethical conduct, and wrongdoing were found in businesses at every stage of the recovery process…”
Tierney said lawmakers should target so-called body brokering — “People that are preying on families with private insurance and getting them into treatment centers just so they can make a profit. …And it doesn’t matter if the treatment center is a good fit for the person, they don’t care, they just want to get you in so they can get a kickback.”
“Companies are involved in patient brokering corporations. We also found nonprofits involved in patient brokering, sober living homes,” said SCI Counsel Lisa Cialino. She said state law bars patient brokering by individuals, but the SCI report recommends banning it industry-wide. The agency also advises increasing fines.
Other reforms recommended include creating strict licensing standards and oversight for so-called peer recovery coaches; setting tougher rules for licenses, financial audits and criminal background checks at treatment centers; and cracking down on sober homes — particularly unlicensed ones — that cram recovering clients together.
“Maybe some are OK,” Cialino said. “But a lot of them we saw, you know, bad drug use issues, bad living conditions, a bunch of people packed into one room … The sober homes are overseen by DCA — the Department of Community affairs. And it doesn’t seem like … that’s effective or currently effective.”
DCA responded, stating, “We are aware of and reviewing the report and take any allegations of fraud and ethical misconduct seriously. We don’t have further comment at this time.”
Tiffany Williams Brewer, chair of SCI, said, “We’re striving to shine a light on this issue, particularly in light of the level of funding that is being dedicated now in our state to the addiction and rehabilitation industry,” Brewer says. “We saw some egregious examples of failure to protect some of the most vulnerable in their time of need. We saw instances of greed. We saw instances of impropriety. We saw dangerous behavior that could leave those who were seeking to get healing to leave worse than when they came in.”