Pathways Drug Rehabilitation Luxury Addiction Treatment & Detox Center
If somebody dies, even in drug rehab, shouldn’t it be a potential crime?
With enormous hope, Gail and Warwick Dunnett sent their son Harrison — a rapper, poet and musician who struggled with learning disabilities — to an addiction treatment center in Pasadena to get well. Harrison, 20, was giddy over his acceptance to the Los Angeles College of Music, and eager to start the next phase of his life.
He had good insurance, so rehab centers were eager to have him as a customer. Soon, he was offered $800 by a “body broker” to jump ship and go to a center in Chatsworth. He did, but soon left that one as well: Romance had blossomed, and at the Chatsworth center intimacy between clients was forbidden. The couple landed next at Casa Bella in Laguna Beach on Dec. 29, 2016. Two days later, New Year’s Eve, Harrison Dunnett was dead.
The wrongful death lawsuit filed by his parents lays the tragedy at the feet of the rehabs and their workers. It also apportions blame for the nurse who, they feel, rendered services that weren’t medically necessary, and with the oversight of a doctor who never saw him. At Casa Bella, Harrison was prescribed a lethal stew of drugs that depressed his breathing and killed him, according to the suit.
In civil court, though, the remedy is money. Rehabs often settle for secret sums and go back to running their businesses under new names. “They’re not held criminally responsible, so it keeps happening and happening and happening,” said Gail Dunnett, Harrison’s mother, as she stood with two other women whose children died in recovery-related tragedies.
Blatant illegal activity inside licensed addiction treatment centers and unregulated sober living homes throughout California is rife, according to parents, court filings and depositions. Recovering addicts with no credentials hand out prescription medications to other recovering addicts. Blank medical orders — signed in advance by physicians — often are filled out by clerks who use their imaginations to justify high-priced urine tests. Illicit drugs make their way into treatment centers that charge hundreds or thousands of dollars a day. Often, as a result of such actions, people die.
But when prosecutors and investigators look into the rehab industry, criminal charges for manslaughter, criminal negligence or worse are exceedingly rare. Why?
‘Discrimination’
Officials in Costa Mesa wonder the same thing.
The city is battling seven lawsuits filed by rehab operators who argue, in federal court, that the city’s new zoning rules for sober living homes are nothing more than an “official campaign against persons in recovery,” and that the new rules discriminate against the disabled.
Costa Mesa’s zoning rules do prohibit sex offenders, violent felons and drug dealers from operating sober homes. They also require 24/7 supervision of clients and they mandate a minimum 650 foot separation between facilities. What’s more, to run a sober home, you need a special permit from the city, which operators say has been virtually impossible to get.
Casa Capri filed suit after it was denied permits to house up to 28 women in eight units. The company argues that the rules violate the Fair Housing Act that it lost money because it was forced to close.
The city is battling those claims on allegations that the center has run afoul of the law. In an eye-popping “unclean hands” defense, Costa Mesa argued, in a filing on Nov. 1, that Casa Capri can’t recover any damages from the city because its business operations were “illegally conducted in the first place.”
Sworn testimony taken over the past several months alleges that Casa Capri took illegal referral fees, directed sober living clients to an affiliated outpatient treatment program in exchange for 20 percent of billing proceeds and allowed unauthorized people to administer medications. Testimony also alleges that Casa Capri got kickbacks from a urine testing operation and participated in insurance fraud by sending urine samples for expensive analysis whether initial tests found drugs were present or not, according to the city’s filing.
A worker “was specifically assigned the extraordinary responsibility of ensuring that insurance carriers would pay for the drug tests by falsifying the information contained in a handwritten note on a certain form that accompanied each specimen bag,” the city said.
Attorneys for Casa Capri did not respond to a request for comment on the city’s filing. In depositions, Casa Capri’s owner and others said they did nothing wrong.
The Dunnetts suspect that a similar scenario was playing out in the center where their son died.
While Southern California remains ground zero of the Rehab Riviera, with nearly 1,000 of the state’s 1,800 licensed or certified addiction treatment facilities clustered in just four counties: Orange, Los Angeles, o one is inspecting Riverside and San Bernardino, Costa Mesa is ground zero’s ground zero. The city of about 114,000 has more licensed rehabs per capita than any place in California save Malibu, population 13,000.
Costa Mesa has spent more than $6 million defending its zoning rules in court. The County of Orange recently adopted its own version of those rules, and would apply them to sober homes hoping to do business on unincorporated county land, but otherwise Costa Mesa is going it alone. Other cities are reluctant to embrace regulations for fear of being sued, officials said — but depositions suggest that such inaction is pushing sober homes out of Costa Mesa and into neighboring cities like Newport Beach and Fountain Valley.
Officials say that might not happen if all cities raised their standards for sober homes, and if law enforcement looked harder at potential criminal activity inside rehabs.
“With bad actors, there needs to be more aggressive law enforcement action,” said Katrina Foley, mayor of Costa Mesa, who lives across the street from a licensed detox.
“Otherwise it’s just a shell game; it’s a civil violation. They pay money and it’s over. They go someplace else and do the same thing again.”
Five years ago, the seaside city of Delray Beach, Fla. was ground zero for addiction treatment in that state. Addicts from other states were lured to Delray Beach with promises of free rehab stays; “body brokers” roamed the streets, delivering people with good insurance plans to the centers that would pay the most for them. And when no more money could be extracted from an addicts’ insurance, that person wound up on local streets, using drugs and, eventually, landing back in rehab.
In 2016, after alarming spikes in opioid overdose deaths, Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg appointed a task force to probe rehab industry abuses and recommend solutions.
Soon, false and misleading advertising became illegal, buying or selling patients became a felony punishable by fines up to $500,000 and prison time, and rehab licensing requirements became more strict.
And Aronberg organized law enforcement agencies from throughout Palm Beach County to focus on crime. In three years, the criminal task force has made 97 arrests.
In the wake of Florida’s response, illegal action has shifted to California, where regulation on the rehab industry is weak, observers say. Aronberg was invited to Orange County last year to share his experience with local prosecutors. And while the county now has a scaled-down version of Aronberg’s sober living task force — which has filed a dozen criminal cases against multiple defendants — many feel the local group is understaffed given the size of the local industry and the prevalence of potentially criminal behavior.
Front-line law enforcement officers feel powerless.
“Right now, when we get a complaint (about a rehab or sober home), we can issue a citation or a nuisance violation,” said Orange County Assistant Sheriff Jeff Hallock at a recent hearing.
“It’s frustrating for people to call law enforcement and be told that nothing can be done,” Hallock added. “Without proper regulatory backbone for this industry, our efforts cannot be successful.”
Jason Redmer died of a drug overdose four days after he entered West Coast Detox in Huntington Beach in 2012. He was 28.
The wrongful death civil suit filed by his mother – settled for an undisclosed amount – said staff didn’t quickly seek medical help when they learned Redmer had found a box filled with so-called “dead meds” and ingested some of those drugs.
His mom, Lynne Redmer, still can’t fathom how no criminal charges sprang from her son’s death. She asked law enforcement to look more closely — surely a case could be made for manslaughter, she suggested — but her son’s cause of death was found to be “undetermined” and officials said there wasn’t much they could do.
Jennifer Snyder, head deputy of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Healthcare Fraud Division, shares that frustration. Her office is prosecuting Christopher Bathum, the self-dubbed “Rehab Mogul” of Southern California who last year was convicted of raping and drugging some of the women who sought help at his Community Recovery centers. Bathum also faces charges for allegedly bilking insurance companies for $176 million.
Several criminal investigations are, indeed, under way related to deaths that may be linked to Bathum’s businesses. But rehab crimes, Snyder said, aren’t easy to prosecute.
“Here’s the challenge: How do I prove that an addict was killed, died, because of the care, or lack of care, that they got?” Snyder said. “Clearly there’s a death. But how do you show causation? When relapse is such a common occurrence in rehab, and since you don’t lock people in cells, how do you prove who put the needle in the arm?
“I understand how painful it is,” she added. “I’ve had more than my share of close people in and out of rehab. I have tried, and I know my fellow prosecutors have tried, to look at these cases from as many ways we can. We will continue to search for a way to capture that.”
While Southern California may not have a clone of Florida’s task force, she noted that local law enforcement agencies do work together on these issues, sharing information and ensuring that they’re not pursuing the same cases.
“My personal belief is, this is an industry that requires much closer regulation,” Snyder said. “Despite the best efforts of administrative actions, it’s a game of whack-a-mole.”
Wendy McEntyre lost her son, Jarrod, to an overdose in a sober living home in the San Fernando Valley in 2004. Twenty-four men were living in the three-bedroom house. One shared some of his speedballs.
This week, standing outside a Santa Ana courthouse with the Dunnetts and Redmer, they were parents united by unfathomable loss.
“There’s a stigma around addiction, and I think officials have a bias,” said McEntyre about why there aren’t more criminal prosecutions. “They think, ‘They’re just addicts, doing what they do.’ But the difference between life and death is someone taking action.”
Costa Mesa Mayor Foley intends to do just that. City officials have been meeting with the Orange County District Attorney’s office, hoping to step up law enforcement’s response to illegal activity inside rehabs.
“We have a new DA. And he seems much more willing to operate in this space and go after bad actors so good actors can actually do the work of helping people,” said Foley, recalling that she recently saw a client from her neighborhood detox house vomit violently on the curb.
“It’s a process,” she said. “I’m as impatient as anyone.”
