American Rehab Chapter 1: A Desperate Call

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Penny Rawlings is relieved to finally get her brother into rehab at a place called Cenikor. She doesn’t realize that getting him out of treatment is going to be the bigger problem.

This is the first chapter in Reveal’s American Rehab series, exposing how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.

Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Edson.
0:10.3	Back in March, we were about to bring you a project we've been working on for years
0:14.4	called American Rehab. Our reporters had been investigating a dark corner of the rehab
0:20.0	industry, but just before we were about to launch, another public health emergency reshaped
0:25.8	all of our lives. We shifted gears to cover the coronavirus outbreak. All the while, we continued
0:31.7	reporting on the opioid epidemic, which has gotten even worse during the pandemic, with dozens
0:37.4	of states reporting a spike in overdoses. Today, we bring you that story, which we're going to tell
0:43.7	you over the next six weeks. We start back in 2019 with a woman named Penny Rawlings. She just had
0:50.8	a long sleepless night. Well, I threw up till about five o'clock in the morning, cried. My husband
0:57.4	tried to calm me down, tried to get me to go to bed. I finally fell asleep about 530 and I got
1:03.3	up at eight. Penny was not sick with a book. She was sick because she had just read a story that
1:09.5	made her physically ill with a combination of fear and guilt, and she needed to contact the reporter.
1:16.0	I was like, I got to get a hold of this lady. I got to tell her that she's on the right track,
1:21.0	that this is at right. People need to know about this. The lady Penny was trying to reach was my
1:26.6	colleague, reveal reporter Shoshana Walter, who we all call Shoe. Eventually, Penny found Shoe on
1:33.8	Twitter and they got on the phone. And it was your article. Well, I mean, I thought my knees were
1:41.0	going to buckle underneath me when I started reading that. Shoe's story was about a drug rehabilitation
1:47.2	center called Senacor, a place Penny had just sent her brother Tim Rowe. But you could you tell me
1:54.8	like what happened? Okay, so I'm 51. My brother's 46. He is skilled trades, had a good job on
2:06.7	his own home cars, boats, motorcycle, you know, Penny and her brother Tim live in Dayton, Ohio. They
2:15.5	grew up right outside the city. If you watch the news, Dayton, Ohio is pretty much the mess in
2:20.7	heroin, capital right now. It's really bad here. Yeah. Tim used to have a good job fixing up
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.