A tool that helps Californians find addiction treatment is facing budget cuts

By David Scheff, especially for CalMatters

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My son Nick was 18 when he became addicted to meth. I didn’t know what to do. The system we turned to for answers didn’t provide either.

What I didn’t fully understand at the time was how universal it was—not just the fear, but the crushing confusion of trying to find care in a system that seemed designed to resist being understood. Addiction is a medical condition, and the science behind it is unequivocal.

Yet for most of the time Nick was struggling, we treated it as something personal and shameful. This stigma didn’t just affect how we felt. It shapes how we seek help, how much we feel we can give, and whether we believe we deserve better than what we’re getting.

The majority of people who need treatment do not receive it, and many who do need treatment end up in programs that do not use approaches that the evidence supports. In case of illness brings shame enough that people delay seeking care, and when that care does not meet a consistent standard of quality, the consequences are exactly what we see: in a 12-month period, almost 10,000 people die of drug overdoses in California.

Now Nick is recovering and I know how lucky we are. Getting there took years and more tries than any of us care to count. We had the resources, the insurance, and the funds to try another program when one failed.

Most families don’t get a second chance. And without reliable information, even the first is a guess.

Part of our difficulty was the nature of the disease, and part of that was a system that offered limited transparency about what it actually provided. What has changed is that some of that transparency already exists.

A parent today can use Atlas of treatmenta free online tool, partially funded by the state, where parents can learn in plain language whether a treatment facility uses evidence-based approaches. This is the kind of verifiable information that didn’t exist when we were looking.

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 spent years writing and speaking about addiction because the silence around him costs lives. The same is true of another information gap; finding a cure is too often a guesswork. For a family with no means, it’s hardly a choice—it’s a prayer.

Tools like the Healing Atlas exist because someone decided that families in crisis deserve more than guesswork. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature must make sure it survives the budget process this month.

The state is facing a multi-billion dollar deficit. Treatment Atlas funding is the kind of humble, unglamorous line that tends to disappear 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 political issue. This is a negotiated position that will decide if a potentially life-saving tool is available when they need it.

Newsom speaks frequently about treating addiction as a health problem and building a more humane, evidence-based behavioral health system. Maintaining this funding is one of the clearest and most practical ways to deliver on this promise. Last year, nearly a million families turned to Atlas.

For a parent at the kitchen table trying to decide where to send a child who might not survive another mistake, this public investment could mean the difference between a fair chance at recovery and another spin on the roulette wheel.

These parents, when faced with one of the most difficult decisions of their lives, need something better than hope, luck and guesswork.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.