The horror stories have not been enough — screaming fights after vulnerable people are kicked out of sober living homes in the middle of the night, relapsing residents vomiting on neighbor’s lawns, ambulances screeching into residential neighborhoods responding to overdoses — so officials are turning to the hard stuff:
Data.
Echoing the Southern California News Group’s Rehab Riviera probe, the newly renamed California Sober Living and Recovery Task Force along with the Association of California Cities Orange County are asking for raw data on law enforcement and code violation calls linked to recovery facilities.
The idea is to move beyond anecdote “to ascertain the fiscal and operational impacts to cities and counties for sober living and recovery home related calls and to understand additional common challenges communities encounter,” a report presented at its meeting July 14 said. “We are collaborating with regional law enforcement and various city community development departments to gather and analyze this information.”
The Mission Viejo-led task force is also eagerly awaiting the results of a newly ordered audit of the Department of Health Care Services, which oversees licensed addiction treatment facilities. Due next year, the audit was requested by Assemblymember Diane Dixon, R-Newport Beach, to “determine if DHCS is properly licensing, regulating and enforcing state laws.”
Many folks who live near these facilities will emphatically tell you DHCS is doing no such thing.
There’s a lack of enforcement from the state, and a refusal to let local governments step into the void, Dixon said at the meeting. “In our communities, we can enforce state vehicle laws — but not these,” she said. “There’s no data. No inputs, no outputs. Are these homes working? The pushback has been, ‘People get well and have a right to be in our neighborhoods.’ I don’t know. Are they getting well?”
Most residential treatment programs operate on 30-, 60- or 90-day cycles for detox, residential and then outpatient treatment, often followed up with sober living. No one can cure addiction in 90 days, Dixon lamented, much less 30.
“Before we can solve a problem, we need facts,” she said. “What I hope to get from this is, where are the gaps? What are the issues? How many people are getting well? How are people getting rehabilitated?”
Wendy Bucknum, the Mission Viejo councilmember who assembled the task force, is thrilled these efforts are going forward. “We’re hoping this will set the stage for some real legislative reform once it’s completed,” she said.
Target date for that legislation: 2025.
Rape, assault, suicide
When yours truly sought data to track the impact of licensed recovery homes on neighborhoods in 2017, we found some stunning things.
While operators say the overwhelming majority try to be good neighbors — and that critics’ fears are unfounded and based in NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard syndrome) — police records showed that recovery centers can place unusual demands on emergency services and introduce spasms of chaos into otherwise-quiet communities.
Calls came in for rape, assault, suicide, attempted suicide, burglary, public intoxication, child endangerment and indecent exposure, among others.
In the eight south Orange County cities patrolled by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, there were 2,500 calls for service during a five-year period. The heaviest-hit were San Clemente, with 926 calls, the majority to just six addresses; and San Juan Capistrano, where there were 667 calls, the majority to just 10 addresses.
In the same five-year span in Pasadena, police had responded to 1,666 calls for service at just 17 rehab addresses. Those included 91 mental health-related calls, 33 public intoxications, 16 sex offender registrations, 16 burglaries, a dozen vehicle thefts, 11 batteries, four overdoses, two indecent exposures, and one each of assault with a deadly weapon, lewd conduct, prostitution, and child endangerment, according to call logs.
In the city of Riverside, there were 1,052 calls for service at 26 licensed rehab centers, including 186 mental health-related calls, 18 overdoses, five sexual assaults, three rapes, one alleged child molestation and one felon with tear gas. A single center on Brockton Avenue generated 285 calls for service.
The data suggested that conflicts between patients and staff were frequent; that patients often bolt from recovery centers with nowhere to go and that drug use during recovery is not uncommon. A meth overdose was reported at a sober living facility; three people high on heroin or other opiates bolted from a recovery facility and drove away; an 18-year-old man ran into traffic on Rancho Viejo Road trying to kill himself; and too much more.
We’ll be eagerly following this data journey.
Accountability Act
The task force also wants to reach cities beyond the Orange Curtain and has a spiffy new website, soberlivingtaskforce.com, to keep folks informed and involved.
An online survey for city and county officials “to gather information about their experiences, challenges, and suggestions regarding sober living homes” is in the works.
So is a library of video and photo testimony from folks “directly impacted by the challenges posed by poorly run sober living homes. Visual documentation will help illustrate the human stories behind the issues we are addressing,” the plan says.
There will also be an attempt to quantify how much of the local homeless population is comprised of people who came to California from other states for addiction treatment and then wound up on the streets. An ultimate goal is “a thoughtful local ordinance template with commonly accepted and legally defensible language.”
Sanchez’s Assembly Bill 1696 — the Sober Living Accountability Act — passed both the Assembly and the Senate and is on the governor’s desk, and there’s hope it would make a difference.
It would require privately owned recovery residences contracted by a government (usually counties), to provide written permission from the property owner, attesting to its use; a code of ethics aligned with the National Alliance for Recovery Residences or the like; written policies addressing a resident’s right to access prescription and nonprescription medication, including medication-assisted treatment (currently frowned upon by “just another drug” types, even though it’s the gold standard of opioid treatment) and proof that naloxone is available and staff knows how to use it.
It would apply to contracts entered into, renewed, or amended after Jan. 1.
A recent report from the Orange County grand jury found that cities continue to wrestle with irresponsible recovery homes, and the grand jury told cities to band together on exactly this sort of cooperative effort. The task force was already at work, and Bucknum hopes that the grand jury’s prodding brings more folks on board.
It appears to be working. In addition to officials from Mission Viejo, attendees at the July 14 meeting included folks from Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Newport Beach, Fountain Valley, San Juan Capistrano, Laguna Niguel, Los Alamitos, Dana Point, Costa Mesa, Lake Forest and Laguna Hills. She hopes for participation from cities in other SoCal counties where the issue is also causing heartache.
Sacramento officials are paying attention as well. In addition to Dixon, lawmakers and/or representatives were there from the offices of Assemblymembers Kate Sanchez and Laurie Davies and Sen. Catherine Blakespear.
Effective recovery facilities are greatly needed, officials said, but the current inability to tell good from bad — and the state making things worse by assuming that every operator in this sphere has a harp and a halo — is harmful to everyone.
Source: Orange County Register
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