My son overdosed in a sober house
Sober homes can be an important component of recovery, but lack of regulation creates the risk for fraud.
Ed died in a sober house in Florida. He was locked in the bathroom for eight hours. No one thought to break down the door. There was no supervision, no structure, no house manager. Just a deteriorated looking ranch house in Florida with three to four residents. I saw pictures online of how horrible the place was. It was a miserable place, there were filthy carpets and mold all over the bathroom.
Six months after Ed’s death, the owners of the sober house were raided by the FBI. They owned the sober house, outpatient treatment center and the lab that they used for testing. His insurance company would pay thousands of dollars a week for urine tests to test for a hundred different substances. The irony is, the insurance company paid these urine testing bills but wouldn’t pay for actual treatment. It was crazy.
“Ed got caught up in patient brokering. He was living in the sober house for free but now I know why – they were getting thousands of dollars for his urine tests. He was a cash cow for them. You’d think they would want to keep him alive.”
