MAJOR EXPOSÉ –

Dec. 20, 2024 – The operators of PHA Healthcare had no significant experience providing drug treatment. But they built a multimillion-dollar business that appears to rely on a practice health officials described as both illegal and increasingly common in Baltimore: trading housing for treatment money.

PHA Healthcare, the company whose program Vlakos entered, collects millions of dollars a year to treat hundreds of people struggling with addiction. But many of its patients have not gotten better. Instead, placed by the company in what are effectively government-funded drug houses, they have relapsed, fallen deeper into addiction and sometimes died, an investigation by The New York Times and The Baltimore Banner has found.

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