Why Rehab Often Fuels Relapse Instead of Recovery

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The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

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4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

More To The Story: The opioid crisis has been a quiet, deadly presence in America for a quarter-century now. Since 1999, it’s killed more than 800,000 people in the US. But in the background, another crisis has been simmering: the often-lawless patchwork of treatment centers and programs that make up America’s drug rehab industry. Many of the roughly 50 million Americans who battle substance abuse rely on this underregulated for-profit industry that too often exploits patients, fails to properly treat them, or even worse. On this week’s More To The Story, journalist Shoshana Walter sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the lingering opioid crisis, the many theories about why overdose deaths have started falling in the US, and the stark racial disparity in how lawmakers have approached the opioid crisis compared with the crack epidemic in the 1980s.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | additional help from Artis Curiskis | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Read: Choose Your Child or Choose Recovery: The Impossible Decision Facing Addicted Mothers (Mother Jones)

Read: Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon & Schuster) Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Treatment certainly can be a really good thing.
0:04.8	It can be a life-changing thing for people.
0:06.9	But it also can be part of the problem.
0:09.3	It can actually fuel relapse rates and overdose deaths rather than always providing people what they need to actually recover.
0:17.8	On this week's more to the story, I talk with author and journalist Shoshana Walter
0:22.0	about why America's drug rehab industry is often failing those who needed the most. Stay with us.
0:34.1	Did you know you have the power to inspire future generations with the same impactful reporting you trust and believe in right now?
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1:34.1	Please consider creating your legacy of truth today.
1:38.3	Thank you.
1:38.8	Thank you. This is more to the story.
1:52.4	The opioid crisis has been a quiet, deadly presence in America for a quarter of a century now.
2:00.0	Since 1999, it's claimed more than 800,000 American
2:03.9	lives. That's more than the number of Americans who died in the Civil War. But in the background,
2:09.6	another crisis has been simmering, the often lawless patchwork of treatment centers and programs
	...

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