My mother paid for Sarah’s first rehab, the one she attended in 2009, while using with Blake. North River Rehab cost $8,000 for thirty days, but I don’t think any of us were happy with the level of supervision or care provided. Sarah was able to:
Hide drugs in her bags, so she didn’t detox for the first few days.
Sneak a cell phone in, so she could call Blake.
Hook up with a guy in the program.
Convince her group therapy that she started using because my mother kicked her out of the car in Oakland, leaving her homeless.
Convince all the other attendees that she was a DJ named Scratch.
It was lax. The next one would be much stricter. Neither took.
The day her treatment ended at North River, my mom, Sharon, and I stood in the parking lot and watched as she got into Blake’s car. They sped off, leaving us covered in dust. Sarah later told me she got high on the drive home. Somewhere between the first rehab and the second, she started shooting up in addition to smoking.
An addict has to be ready to get clean, want to do the work of sobriety, want to feel again. Having been an addict myself, I’m not sure why it was so hard for me to see this. I really thought I could want it for her. Or that I could be that part for her. I was ready to get sober, Sarah should also be ready. Both times Sarah went to rehab, it was because I told her she had to or she would die or lose her family. I didn’t take into consideration that she didn’t want to get clean.
We couldn’t afford to send Sarah to a “good” rehab center, a place that was properly staffed, with comprehensive and holistic treatment, including licensed therapists and psychiatrists. Looking at facilities for Sarah, I found that the presence of even one licensed therapist meant a cost of $20,000 a month on the lower end, and upwards of $60,000 a month for the more fully staffed, pricier centers.
I’ve since learned that addiction treatment represents a $35 billion industry in the United States. There are more than 14,500 centers that specialize in substance abuse, but there are no federal standards regulating the industry. As a result, there is very little oversight for recovery facilities in the United States. There is even less oversight for halfway houses and sober-living homes. Investigative reporters have unearthed terrible stories about rehab systems in California, Florida, and New York, just to name a few—profitable empires of transitional housing, with no scientific support, that are pervaded by fraud.a Rarely is the rehab industry accountable for a standard of evidence-based care for addicts, and rarely does it practice evidence-based care, such as cross-treating drug addiction and mental health issues, which, I can see now, Sarah needed.
I chose Sarah’s second rehab, Shining Light Recovery, for two reasons: it was far away from Sarah’s addict friends so they couldn’t come see her, and it cost only $3,000 a month with a payment plan option. Within a couple weeks, though, she was kicked out for showering with another girl. Sexual conduct was not allowed, so she moved to a women’s sober-living house.
Living at that house led to Sarah’s longest stretch of sobriety since she started using, about a year. It was one of the first times in her life she lived with only women. She had to do chores, cook, attend meetings, be accountable to her roommates, and get a sponsor. It gave her a foundation of skills to build on. In some ways, Sarah was forever fifteen. She had difficulty making dinner or handling a bank account or setting a schedule for herself. While other people her age were learning how to do laundry or write a check, Sarah was in a bus with her band of lost boys, festival hopping and dropping Molly. While her high school classmates applied to college, started jobs, or took gap years to travel, Sarah was ransacking unlocked cars for wallets, iPhones, and cameras she could pawn.
She had a different set of skills that weren’t entirely useful as she tried to reenter the world newly clean and sober. Her first instinct was to hustle. When do our instincts take root? I think often about the timing of our different entry points—into substance abuse and recovery. By the time I entered sobriety, years after my turn to dark drinking, I had already lived on my own, navigated cancer and the subsequent treatment. I had developed a basic skill set for dealing with the logistics of adulthood. When I got sober, I had something to return to, a knowledge base that provided me with a little structure. When Sarah got clean, it was like she was trying to learn to walk before she could even crawl.
About six months into sobriety, she signed up for community college courses. My mother and Sharon urged her to take just one or two classes, get a feel for the workload, so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Instead, she took a full load of units. She dropped most of the classes before the semester was over. She felt like she would never catch up to her peers. The sense of insurmountability made it difficult for her to move past perceived failures; if she couldn’t make it through one full semester, how could she ever be successful academically?
I hate who I am. I hate the person that drugs make me into. It is not me anymore breathing my breath—it is all the drugs—talking, laughing, crying through my life. You might as well suck the coating off me, chop me up and snort me.
—Sarah’s journal, April 5, 2007
a See especially: Kim Barker’s reporting for the New York Times on “Three-Quarter” homes; Cat Ferguson’s reporting for BuzzFeed on South Florida’s Delray Beach; and Hillel Aron’s reporting for LA Weekly on Los Angeles’s “Rehab Mogul”
Monday, October 21, 2013
Small Town, USA—On Sunday, Oct. 20, at 7:05 P.M., the female victim of a shooting on Friday night at Little Tree Trailer Park succumbed to her injuries and died. The male victim had been pronounced dead on the scene late Friday night.
The victims have now been identified as Clayton Sparks, 32, and Lindsey Levy, 29. Next of kin have been notified.
Sheriff’s officials released a statement saying that the case was being investigated as a robbery and double homicide. They do not believe the victims were involved in the burglary, saying, “From what we can tell, Clayton Sparks interrupted a robbery in progress and was shot during a subsequent altercation.”
Investigators were hopeful that Lindsey Levy would recover and be able to provide a statement about what happened, but unfortunately Levy never regained consciousness.
The owner of the trailer that had been burgled has been notified and returned early Sunday to assess the damage. Edgar Duran reported to police that cash, jewelry, and an antique watch were missing. There was also significant damage to the trailer as well as to a safe belonging to Duran that was blasted open, most likely with the same gun used in the murders.