Drug users are lured to S. Fla., then lost

Report: Rehabs turn patients away after insurance runs out

Drug users from around the country are streaming to South Florida, lured by promises of recovery in a paradise of sunshine and palm trees.

Many private treatment centers here are aggressively marketing in parts of the Northeast and Midwest ravaged by the opioid epidemic, law enforcement officials say.

One study found that three of four people in private treatment in Florida are from out of state. Providers entice people looking for a fresh start, then turn them away after exhausting their insurance benefits, according to a report commissioned in Palm Beach County.

Many of those people wind up on the streets of our communities, returning to drug use and overwhelming police and hospitals, the report says.

Paramedics in Palm Beach County, for example, dealt with 5,000 overdose calls last year. The county is hiring additional coroners to deal with the rising opioid death toll, which jumped from 143 in 2012 to 592 last year.

In Broward County, opioids killed 582 people last year, and Chief Medical Examiner Craig Mallak has said the figure is likely to exceed1,000 in 2017.

Medical examiners in both counties say they are struggling to keep up with the bodies of people enticed here by a growing number of treatment centers.

Palm Beach County has the highest number of li--

censed drug treatment providers in the state at 217, compared with 134 in Broward County and 111 in Miami-Dade, according to a Sun Sentinel analysis of data from the Department of Children and Families.

In just two years, 76 new licenses were issued in Palm Beach County and 28 in Broward County, according to the analysis. Miami-Dade County saw its number of licensed providers fall by11.

In the past, people who ran out of money or insurance could turn to publicly funded treatment programs, which must treat anyone regardless of ability to pay. But the opioid epidemic has overwhelmed the system, said Alton Taylor, CEO of the Drug Abuse Foundation, a publicly funded provider.

“We have fewer services and fewer options today,” Taylor said.

The number of publicly funded treatment beds in Palm Beach County fell from 467 a decade ago to 202 today, Taylor said. The number of detox beds — where a person gets clean before beginning longerterm treatment — has dropped from 50 to 24 in 10 years.

Broward County is in a slightly better situation with 34 detox beds at the Broward Addiction Recovery Center, said Silvia Quintana, CEO of the Broward Behavioral Health Coalition.

Still, people without money or insurance — unable to get into private treatment— often wait weeks for a bed in a public facility, Taylor said. Some die before they can get help.

Kicked out of a halfway house and out of options, 30-year-old Patrick Graney went to the publicly funded Drug Abuse Foundation looking for help.

A marketer persuaded Graney to come to Florida from Massachusetts in late July to try to beat a 10-year addiction to opioids at a private center, said his mother, Maureen.

When his insurance lapsed, he found himself on the streets with nowhere to go, she said.

The Drug Abuse Foundation turned Graney away because there wasn’t a bed, and he died of a drug overdose at a nearby hotel just hours later, according to a Delray Beach police report.

“If he had gotten into that detox, he would have been on a bus home,” Maureen Graney said.