AHS Views

A treatment program called Gateway, with several facilities in Illinois, is having its funding cut by $11 million. To try to stay open without that money, they’re reducing their 90 – 120 day treatment plan to 30 days. In fact, they’re even kicking out their current clients if they arrived before January 1st – right in the middle of treatment! Most of these people are going to leave still needing addiction help to stay straight!

Gateway would do much better to service fewer people but be able to work with them long enough to get them fully rehabilitated. That way they’ll be able to go back out into society and lead a productive life instead of getting back into drugs or alcohol. 30 days is barely enough time to get them off the drug and functioning more normally – then they need the time to address why they got addicted in the first place and set them up so it won’t happen again.

Really. What’s the point of ‘treating’ a lot of people without getting that result?

Some of the people being forced to leave the facility are worried.

“A lot of the peers that are here are terrified to go home and scared they’re just going to be sent back to the same environment they came from, with all the same friends, and not enough skills to stay away from what they need to stay away from,” Aston, an 18-year-old heroin addict who started smoking marijuana when he was 10, recently told a reporter covering the story.

And Gateway Director Steve Wierman is also concerned, rightfully so, about being able to get results with short-term treatment plans. “We’re not in favor of doing that. We believe in long term treatment but we got to get paid or we can’t stay open,” he said. Understood, but what about the results?

It has been proven over and over again that a long-term drug rehab program is really necessary to get someone all the help they need to stay off drugs. And if they don’t stay off them after treatment, you’ve really wasted time and money. And set the person up to fail.

What kind of treatment is that?