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Rehab: An American Scandal (2025) [audiobook+ebook]
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| Size | Seeds | Peers | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 233.04 MiB | 4 | 0 | 38 |
| File | Duration |
|---|---|
| Shoshana Walter - Rehab- An American Scandal.mp3 | 8h16m |
| Total Duration | 8h16m00s |
Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry.
Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before. So why isn’t it working? The answer is that in America—where anyone can get addicted—only certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths, our default response is still to punish, while rehabs across the United States fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and exploit patients. We’ve heard a great deal about the opioid crisis foisted on America by Big Pharma, but we’ve heard too little about the other half of this epidemic—the reason why so many remain mired in addiction. Until now.
In this book, you’ll find the stories of four people who represent the failures of the rehab-industrial complex, and the ways our treatment system often prevents recovery.
- April is a black mom in Philadelphia, who witnessed firsthand how the government’s punitive response to the crack epidemic impeded her own mother’s recovery—and then her own.
- Chris, a young middle-class white man from Louisiana, received more opportunities in his addiction than April, including the chance to go to treatment instead of prison. Yet the only program the judge permitted was one that forced him to perform unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies.
- Wendy is a mother from a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, whose son died in a sober living home. She began investigating for-profit treatment programs—yet law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored her warnings, allowing rehab patients to die, again and again.
- Larry is a surgeon who himself struggled with addiction, who would eventually become one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Together, these four stories illustrate the pitfalls of a system that not only fails to meet the needs of people with addiction, but actively benefits from maintaining their lower status. They also offer insight into how we might fix that system and save lives.
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Comments
The rehab field is either a
The rehab industry is either a racket or a guilt trip. Successful alternatives are suppressed by emotional/financial parasites.
AA and the "12 Step" programs force you to "surrender" to a "higher power" before you even begin. They tell you that you have a disease from which you will never be cured. That eats away your dignity at the time you need it most. This saps your willpower. Without willpower, quitting is impossible, unless you submit to daily humiliation and submission to a "higher power". People in AA are very sad people, but it doesn't have to be that way. Cure rate: 0% by their own admission!
Then there is the obscenely profitable rehab industry that tells you there is no hope of ever quitting without their help.
Simple facts: Quitting without willpower is impossible. With willpower, you don't need anything else!
I remember hearing about
I remember hearing about psychedelic therapy back in the early 1960s, wherein an alcoholic had a high dose LSD experience and was shown all the ways in which alcohol was destroying his life, the reason why he drank, and basically 10 years worth of psychotherapy in one psychedelic experience. He then quit alcohol after that, because the emotions brought up by the psychedelic therapy was strong enough to encourage him to stop.
That's one other alternative, besides other things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that can get people to quit drinking. AA meetings literally last a lifetime. Even if you quit drinking 30 years ago, you still have to attend the AA meetings and call yourself a recovering alcoholic. It's like a life sentence!
TheCorsair00 wrote:
It is. If you tell your sponsor or others in your group that you want to quit attending, they get nasty, telling you you'll fail, you're a "dry drunk", etc. The guilt trip triples!
Another major problem with AA and NA is the meetings are riddled with emotional vampires and sexual predators.
Horror stories abound of nasty people guilt tripping and/or gaslighting the vulnerable. These vampires feed off emotional energy from others; the more drama, the better the feeding.
Then there's the creepy sexual predators that pounce on young newcomers (male and female). "Management" or oversight is nonexistent, so they can get away with plenty before they are removed and/or charged.