By Jane Smith
Rogue sober homes are so overwhelming south county coastal communities that leaders of the three largest cities are grasping at anything that holds promise to protect their neighborhoods.
They all want a seat on the Palm Beach County state attorney’s drug treatment task force.
“We definitely want to be involved with that task force,” said Susan Haynie, Boca Raton mayor.
Delray Beach Mayor Cary Glickstein said, “We have been at the table from the beginning pleading for real assistance.” His city is known as the “recovery capital of America” because of its numerous treatment centers and sober homes.
The state Legislature awarded State Attorney Dave Aronberg $275,000 to review drug treatment laws and report back by year’s end.
Said Alan Johnson, chief assistant state attorney, who volunteered to set up the task force: “I have received hundreds of emails from people who want to be involved in this project.”
The money began flowing July 1, the start of the state’s budget year. Johnson was fine-tuning the task force in the final days of June.
Aronberg was chosen because of his “drug czar” role in helping the state clean up the pill mill industry in 2011.
Prosecutor Justin Chapman will lead the task force, which will be divided into at least two groups, Johnson said.
A former captain with the state Division of Insurance, Ted Padich, will head the law enforcement group. Before joining the state, he spent 20 years on the Boynton Beach police force.
Delray Beach Police Chief Jeff Goldman will assign an officer to that group. In 2015, Delray Beach police responded to 144 heroin overdoses, 10 of which were fatal. Through May of this year, 202 heroin overdoses occurred in the city, resulting in 18 fatalities.
The heroin overdoses peaked at 64 in March. To combat that rise, Delray Beach police started Operation Street Sweeper in late February. Undercover officers bought narcotics from known dealers, resulting in at least 30 arrests.
Boynton Beach will also assign an officer to that group.
Police Chief Jeffrey Katz said the group can be successful if the members put their heads together and combine resources, just as they did when fighting the pill mill crises.
Through early June, Boynton Beach dealt with 121 overdoses and seven overdose deaths.
The other group of the task force will have a mix of providers, elected officials, Florida Association of Recovery Residences President John Lehman, a drug court judge and activists.
This group will hold its first meetings from 2 to 5 p.m. July 13 and 14. The meetings will be open to the public and held in the West Palm Beach Police Department’s community room.
FARR has a voluntary certification program for recovery residences, the industry preferred term for sober homes. Starting in July, state-licensed drug and alcohol treatment centers will be barred from discharging patients or referring clients to recovery residences that are not certified.
But the association didn’t receive any state money for this budget year.
Boca Raton was the first community that tried to regulate recovery residences, Haynie said, “but unfortunately we lost.”
In 2003, the city was sued in federal court over zoning laws created to protect its neighborhoods. Boca Raton lost that case in 2007 when the judge ruled that the zoning laws discriminated against recovering addicts.
Cities, including Delray Beach, also lost court cases when recovery residences and their clients sued under federal disability and fair housing laws. Sometimes the judges awarded multimillion-dollar damages to the recovery residence operators and their clients. Addicts in recovery are seen as a family unit protected under federal laws.
Johnson, of the state attorney’s office, admits that’s a “tightrope to work with, but it can be done effectively. … We’ll have to educate (the cities) about what can be done within the federal laws.”
Addicts and their families are lured to South Florida by the pictures of paradise painted by tourism officials. They are also recruited to come here by profit-seeking providers.
Once they are here, a 28-day stay in a treatment center is the norm, thanks to the Mental Health Parity Act of 2008 that requires health insurers to provide the same level of treatment for addictions as they would for other medical problems. From there, patients are released to recovery residences where they live with other recovering addicts.
In Palm Beach County, rogue operators have infiltrated the drug treatment industry — with allegations of insurance fraud, patient brokering and kickbacks, Johnson said.
The FBI began raiding such places nearly two years ago, but so far there have been no indictments.
2015 overdose deaths
Ten of the deaths occurred at motels, another nine at recovery residences.
Boynton Beach 28
Delray Beach 25
Boca Raton 20
Source: Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office
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