For more than a year, we have been investigating drug and alcohol rehab programs that offer a tantalizing promise: freedom from addiction for free.
In exchange for treatment, people with addiction are required to work full-time jobs and turn over their paychecks to the rehab center. But we found that some of these programs are little more than work camps for private industry.
Now we need your help to keep the investigation going.
At each rehab we dug into, we found unique problems: Former chicken executives who created a rehab to provide chicken plants with labor. A judge who had participants do his yard work. Fortune 500 companies and powerful politicians reaping the benefits of the cheap labor. Participants put to work as caregivers in an assisted living facility, dispensing the very drugs that landed them in rehab.
We have amassed a list of tips about other rehabs that merit more scrutiny. But it would take years for us to do a deep dive on each of them.
So we’re opening up our database of tips to reporters and editors who want to investigate these work-based rehabs in their own communities. And we’ve put together a reporting guide with our pointers on how to investigate programs in your area.
Do you have experience with a work-based rehab? Share your story.