California needs accountability system for addiction treatment facilities | Opinion
The night I took my son, Stephen, to the hospital, I believed I was doing the right thing. My son, who lived with a substance use disorder, had told me he wanted to die.
I thought I was taking him somewhere that would help, but the hospital did not admit him. A staff member handed us a piece of paper with phone numbers on it and sent us back out into the dark night.
I started calling and found out that most facilities couldn’t take him. One finally said yes, so we went. But it remains one of the worst moments of my life as a mother: We were not making a choice, we were doing what the system required of us, because the system had nothing better to offer.
California has the opportunity to change that for families facing the same dilemma. Assembly Bill 2343, authored by Assemblymember Dr. Darshana Patel, D-San Diego, currently moving through the California Legislature, would require non-Medi-Cal treatment facilities to participate in a public quality rating system as a condition of their license, administered by the State Department of Health Care Services. The administrator of that system would also be prohibited from accepting payment from the facilities it rates.
Together, those provisions would make outcomes visible to anyone who needs them, without the conflict of interest that has long plagued the industry.
Families like mine have been asking for exactly this kind of accountability for years.
Stephen was a Navy veteran. He had been working toward recovery for over a decade, and getting sober was the organizing fact of his life. He fought for it with everything he had. I fought alongside him, which meant learning — slowly, painfully — how the treatment system actually works.
What I found was a system that presents itself as trustworthy at the exact moment families are least equipped to question it. When someone you love is in crisis, you act on whatever information is in front of you. You call facilities and take them at their word. You do not have time to audit every claim.
California spends more than a billion dollars a year on addiction treatment. Nearly 4.8 million Californians who needed substance use treatment in 2021 did not receive it — roughly 90% of those with diagnosed substance use disorders. And for the families who do manage to get someone through the door, there is no reliable way to know whether the program they are trusting with their loved one’s life will deliver what it promises.
That gap — between the existence of treatment and the accountability of treatment — is where Stephen lived and died.
The argument for transparency in addiction treatment is sometimes framed as a consumer protection issue, a matter of informed choice. That framing undersells it. When someone is calling facilities at 2 a.m., the absence of reliable information is a condition that determines whether someone lives or dies.
Stephen was sober for eight months before he succumbed to his disease on March 26, 2022. He had gone through program after program, each one carrying promises that did not match the reality of care.
In 2023, 7,560 Californians died from opioid-related overdoses. Behind every one of those deaths is a family that made decisions under pressure, with whatever information they could find. Too much of that information was wrong. Some of the programs they trusted did not deliver what they said they would. And there remains no mechanism to hold any of it to account.
Treatment providers should be transparent about what they offer and answerable for what they deliver. It is the minimum standard any patient deserves, in any area of medicine.
Stephen deserved that standard. So does every family still in the fight.
Andree Scanlon is a California resident and advocate who has spent years raising awareness of the addiction epidemic. She lost her son, Stephen, on March 26, 2022.
This story was originally published April 10, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California needs accountability system for addiction treatment facilities | Opinion."