A Promise Not Met –

I have been in the addiction treatment field for over 43 years. I have held virtually every position from Intake counselor to CEO. I have restructured 8 treatment centers of various sizes and licenses. I am a licensed attorney with over 25 years of health care law experience. I have witnessed the addiction treatment field settle for crumbs from the federal and state governments, from insurance companies as well as others. In spite of all of the hard work by many outstanding individuals and their agencies, once again we have settled.

As has been widely reported over the past several years, the issue of body brokering has reached to every level of the addiction treatment field. This obscene practice of unqualified salespeople, conspiring with unethical and unqualified program owners using patently unethical and illegal acts to line their pockets must be crushed. In this paper I am defining body brokering as payment to or from a business or individual for the referral of a client, or a client’s biological fluids for drug testing. How the payment is made is not relevant, it is a function of securing a referral by trading something of value, such as money, trips, cars etc.

There are state and Federal laws with real teeth that prohibit body brokering when they are enforced. These laws are described below. The new law signed by Governor Brown is a toothless tiger.

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