Everyone gets paid in the Drug Abuse Treatment Business!
Vin (Frank Grillo), the movie’s narrator and CEO of New West, a snake-oil treatment facility, explains that with the Affordable Care Act, an operation like New West can bill roughly $300,000 per patient for a 90-day stay. Multiply that by 60 beds, booked year-round, and New West’s annual haul approaches $72 million. “The success rate in drug rehabilitation is 10%,” he says. And for all those failures, there’s financial incentive for his affable lead recruiter, Wood (Michael Kenneth Williams), to send them right back when they fall off the wagon.
It’s what we in the treatment industry call a GOLD RUSH!
The movie opens with two street urchins, Utah (Jack Kilmer) and Opal (Alice Englert), committing convenience-store robberies and prostitution to score their next fix of crack or heroin, the couple’s DOC (Drug of Choice).
In walks Wood, Vin’s main body broker, meets Utah and Opal and offers them a chance to get sober. Opal scoffs, but Utah wants to get clean and leaves Opal in Ohio and takes Wood’s invitation to New West in sunny-ville California.
As Utah finishes up his 30 days he learns from Wood, every time he sends New West a new addict, he scores a commission, and the “drug user” gets a cut too! Wood wants Utah to help him convince other addicts to come to New West, score a commission, pay the drug abuser to sober up and then motivate them to get high again and come back for another round of a “paid sober vacation.”
The movie captures the insidious underbelly of the drug treatment & insurance industry game in California in graphic detail with an ugly ending followed the movie’s redeeming final message: “Millions of p[eople have maintained sobriety through twelve-step programs which don’t cost a dollar.”
Review by Cameron F.