This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
My son Nic was 18 when he became addicted to methamphetamine. I didn’t know what to do. The system we turned to for answers didn’t either.
What I didn’t fully understand then was how universal this was — not just the fear, but the grinding confusion of trying to find care in a system that seemed designed to resist being understood. Addiction is a medical condition, and the science on this is not ambiguous.
Yet for most of the time Nic was struggling, we treated it as something private and shameful. That stigma didn’t only affect how we felt. It shaped how we looked for help, how much we felt we could push back and whether we believed we deserved better than what we were getting.
The majority of people who need treatment don’t receive it, and many who do wind up in programs that don’t use approaches that evidence supports. When a disease carries enough shame that people delay seeking care and when that care isn’t held to a consistent standard of quality, the consequences are exactly what we’re seeing: In a 12-month period, nearly 10,000 people die of drug overdoses in California.
Nic is in recovery now, and I’m aware of how fortunate we are. Getting there took years and more attempts than either of us would want to count. We had resources, insurance and the means to try another program when one failed.
Most families don’t get a second chance. And without reliable information, even the first one is a guess.
Some of our difficulty was the nature of the disease, and some of it was a system that offered limited transparency about what it was actually providing. What has changed is that some of that transparency now exists.
A parent today can utilize Treatment Atlas, a free online tool partially funded by the state, where parents can learn, in plain language, whether a treatment facility uses evidence-backed approaches. It is the kind of verifiable information that didn’t exist when we were searching.
For a family trying to make a serious decision under serious pressure, it’s the difference between an informed choice and a leap of faith.
I’ve spent years writing and speaking about addiction, because the silence around it costs lives. The same is true about another information gap; finding treatment is too often guesswork. For a family without resources, it’s barely a choice at all — it’s a prayer.
Tools like Treatment Atlas exist because someone decided families in crisis deserve better than guesswork. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature should make sure it survives the budget process this month.
The state is facing a multibillion-dollar deficit. Treatment Atlas’s funding is the kind of modest, unglamorous line item that tends to vanish in budget cuts — not because someone decided it wasn’t worth it, but because no one fought to keep it.
For families like mine, this is not an abstract policy question. It’s a line item that will decide whether a potentially life-saving tool is there when they need it.
Newsom has spoken often about treating addiction as a health issue and about building a more humane, evidence-based behavioral health system. Sustaining this funding is one of the clearest, most practical ways to act on that promise. Last year, nearly a million families turned to Atlas.
For a parent at a kitchen table, trying to decide where to send a child who might not survive another mistake, that public investment could mean the difference between a fair chance at recovery and another spin of the roulette wheel.
These parents, when they’re facing one of the hardest decisions of their lives, need something better to go on than hope, luck and guesswork.
