California cannot solve the addiction crisis if we continue to let fear determine where recovery is allowed to happen.
There are moments in this work that stay with you forever.
One of those moments wasn’t a graduation ceremony, although I’ve attended hundreds of them. It wasn’t watching someone receive a 20-year recovery birthday chip or hearing a parent say, “I finally have my son back.”
It was standing with a mother whose son had died while waiting for treatment.
She wasn’t angry about addiction. She wasn’t angry at him. She looked at me through tears and asked one question I have never forgotten:
“Why couldn’t he get help when he finally asked for it?”
After more than 30 years in recovery myself and more than 25 years working to expand addiction treatment in California, I still struggle to answer that question.
The painful truth is that sometimes help simply isn’t available.
Not because we don’t know how to treat addiction. Not because recovery isn’t possible. But because too often we allow fear, stigma, discrimination, and politics to stand in the way of building the very places where recovery begins.
That reality was painfully evident in the recent collapse of the proposed Serenity Recovery Campus in San Pedro. The project would have transformed a vacant property into a 106-bed residential treatment center serving veterans and others struggling with substance use disorders. According to the Los Angeles Times, neighbors protested the project, picketed outside the property, packed public meetings and voiced concerns about people with addiction coming into their community.
Ultimately, the California Department of Health Care Services rescinded the project’s $73.4-million Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program award, citing concerns regarding the project’s financing structure and appraisal.
Those financial concerns deserve careful review. Public dollars must always be protected.
But the public debate surrounding this project revealed something much deeper than a funding decision.
It exposed how quickly compassion can disappear when recovery comes too close to home.
We Say We Support Recovery
Every September we celebrate National Recovery Month. We applaud people who have overcome addiction. We share stories of hope. We recognize counselors, physicians, peers and treatment professionals. We declare that addiction is a chronic medical condition—not a moral failure.
California has invested billions of dollars to expand behavioral health services because state leaders recognize what those of us in this field have known for decades: There simply are not enough treatment beds. The California Department of Housing and Community Development has likewise emphasized the importance of supportive housing and recovery-oriented communities in addressing our behavioral health and housing challenges.
Yet when a treatment center is proposed, something changes.
Recovery becomes acceptable—just somewhere else.
The Last Acceptable Form of Discrimination
Imagine neighbors organizing to stop a cancer treatment center.
Imagine residents protesting a rehabilitation hospital because they feared stroke patients.
Imagine public officials supporting efforts to keep people recovering from heart surgery out of their neighborhoods.
Most of us would immediately recognize that as discrimination.
Yet when the patients are recovering from substance use disorders, fear is often treated as reasonable.
I’ve heard the comments for decades: “They’ll bring crime.” “Our property values will decline.” “Those people don’t belong here.”
What saddens me is that most people making these statements have never walked through the doors of a licensed treatment facility.
If they did, they wouldn’t see criminals. They would see fathers trying to become better dads. Mothers praying they can earn back the trust of their children. Veterans carrying invisible wounds. Healthcare professionals who became dependent on prescription medication after surgery. Young adults hoping to escape fentanyl before it becomes their obituary.
These aren’t “those people.” They are our neighbors. They are our coworkers. They are our veterans. They are our sons and daughters. They are Californians.
Recovery Makes Communities Stronger
One of the greatest misconceptions about addiction treatment is that recovery facilities somehow weaken neighborhoods. The opposite is true.
Organizations such as the Coalition of Advocates for Better Addiction Treatment, the California Recovery Coalition, the California Coalition of Addiction Recovery Advocates and countless treatment providers throughout California have demonstrated what research—and experience—continue to confirm: Treatment works. Recovery works. Communities become stronger when people recover.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has repeatedly identified stigma as one of the greatest barriers preventing people from seeking treatment. Shame delays care. Fear isolates families. Discrimination discourages recovery.
Recovery reduces overdose deaths. Recovery reduces incarceration. Recovery reunites families. Recovery creates employees, taxpayers, mentors, volunteers, coaches and community leaders.
Every person who recovers strengthens the community they return to.
Leadership Requires Courage
Public officials should absolutely listen to their constituents.
But leadership is about more than listening. Leadership means helping communities separate fear from fact. It means standing with vulnerable populations when they become the target of misinformation and stigma.
Behavioral health policy cannot be determined solely by whoever speaks the loudest at a town hall meeting.
People seeking treatment deserve leaders willing to say something simple: Recovery belongs in every community.
Someday It May Be Someone You Love
Addiction doesn’t care where you live. It doesn’t care about your politics. It doesn’t care how much money you make. It doesn’t care whether your child attends public school or private school.
It reaches every race, every religion, every profession, every neighborhood and every family.
One day, someone you love may quietly say four words you never imagined hearing: “I need help.”
When that day comes, you won’t ask whether the treatment center is located near someone else’s home. You won’t worry about neighborhood meetings. You won’t ask whether nearby residents objected.
You will ask one question: “Is there a bed available?”
And if the answer is no because another treatment center was never built, because another project was defeated, because another community decided recovery belonged somewhere else, the consequences won’t be political.
They’ll be personal.
We Have to Decide Who We Are
California cannot end the addiction crisis without places where recovery can happen.
We cannot celebrate recovery while opposing recovery facilities. We cannot call addiction a disease while treating the people seeking treatment as though they are something to fear.
Every treatment center represents hope. Every recovery residence represents a second chance. Every treatment bed represents the possibility that someone’s son, daughter, spouse, parent, sibling, coworker or friend will live long enough to rebuild their life.
The question before us isn’t whether treatment facilities belong in our neighborhoods.
The question is whether compassion does.
Because when compassion stops at the property line, hope often stops there too.
And for far too many California families, that means one more empty chair at the dinner table.
California is better than that.
We know recovery works. Now we must prove that our compassion does too.
Pete Nielsen
California Consortium of Addiction Programs and Professionals (CCAPP)