A new bill won’t bring my son back, but it could save someone else’s

Capitol Weekly welcomes Opinions on California public policy or politics. Please read our guidelines for opinion pieces before submitting an Op-Ed. Submissions that do not adhere to our guidelines will not be considered for publication. 

OPINION – California spends over a billion dollars annually on addiction treatment – but doesn’t hold treatment providers to quality standards. A new bill could change that.

The night I took my son to the hospital, I believed I was doing the right thing. Stephen, who lived with a substance use disorder, had told me he wanted to die. I had him in the car. I was taking him somewhere that would help.

They did not admit him. A staff member handed us a piece of paper with phone numbers on it and sent us back out into the night.

I started calling. Most facilities couldn’t take him. One finally said yes — but only if he had alcohol in his system at intake. So we stopped on the way. I watched my son drink so the system designed to save him would agree to see him. It remains one of the worst moments of my life as a mother. We were not making a choice. We were doing what the system required of us, because the system had nothing better to offer.

Stephen was a Navy veteran. He had been working toward recovery for over a decade, and getting sober was the organizing fact of his life. He fought for it with everything he had. I fought alongside him, which meant learning — slowly, painfully — how the treatment system actually works.

What I found was a system that presents itself as trustworthy at the exact moment families are least equipped to question it. When someone you love is in crisis, you act on whatever information is in front of you. You call facilities and take them at their word. You do not have time to audit every claim. You trust, because the alternative is doing nothing.

California spends more than a billion dollars a year on addiction treatment. Nearly 4.8 million Californians who needed substance use treatment in 2021 did not receive it — roughly 90 percent of those with diagnosed substance use disorders. And for the families who do manage to get someone through the door, there is no reliable way to know whether the program they are trusting with their loved one’s life will deliver what it promises.

That gap — between the existence of treatment and the accountability of treatment — is where Stephen lived and died.

The argument for transparency in addiction treatment is sometimes framed as a consumer protection issue, a matter of informed choice. That framing undersells it. When someone is calling facilities at two in the morning, the absence of reliable information is a condition that determines whether someone lives or dies.

Stephen was sober for eight months before he succumbed to this disease on March 26, 2022. He had gone through program after program, each one carrying promises that did not always match the reality of care.

In 2023, 7,560 Californians died from opioid-related overdoses. Behind every one of those deaths is a family that made decisions under pressure, with whatever information they could find. Some of that information was wrong. Some of the programs they trusted did not deliver what they said they would. And there was no mechanism to hold any of it to account.

California has the opportunity to change that. AB 2343, currently moving through the California Legislature, would require treatment facilities to participate in a public quality rating system as a condition of their license, making their outcomes visible to anyone who needs them.

That bill exists because families like mine have been asking for exactly this kind of accountability for years. It’s a rounding error in the California state budget.

The question of whether treatment providers should be transparent about what they offer and answerable for what they deliver should not be a difficult one. It is the minimum standard any patient deserves, in any area of medicine.

Stephen deserved that standard. So does every family still in the fight.

Andree Scanlon is a Fullerton resident and advocate who has spent years raising awareness of the addiction epidemic.