This is in conversation from Apple News.

I'm Shemitabasu.

Today, the dark side of America's rehab industry.

The United States is in the grip of a devastating opioid epidemic.

Since 1999, more than a million Americans have died of drug overdoses.

And while fatal overdoses have fallen in recent years,

hundreds of thousands of people continue to cycle through treatment programs,

many of which fail to help them achieve lasting recovery. There's no snap-of-the-finger, magic cure for addiction. It can be a long-term problem and a complicated problem to solve. That's Shoshana

Walter. She's covered the addiction treatment system in the U.S. for years.

As a reporter at Reveal, she co-hosted the podcast series American Rehab. And in her new book,

Rehab and American Scandal, she lays out how the very system meant to help people recover

has too often failed them. And in some some cases even exploited them. She argues that this

system bears responsibility for prolonging America's addiction crisis. Someone who's entering a

treatment program is especially vulnerable because they have accepted that they have a problem

and they want help.

And now their lives are being put in the hands of treatment providers that often have good intentions, but many programs often don't.

I started by asking Shishana to explain the origins of our addiction treatment system and how it's evolved over time.

Over the past 25 plus years of the opioid epidemic, our country has really undergone an enormous transformation in terms of how we approach and treat drug addiction. You know, during the crack cocaine epidemic, we really

treated addiction as more of a moral failing that was deserving of punishment. It was criminalized,

and we incarcerated people disproportionately black and brown drug users in mass. And then with the

opioid epidemic, the pain pill epidemic, it started out mainly affecting white

communities and our country undertook a very different approach to addiction.

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