Choosing a drug rehab facility for in-patient care is still a shot in the dark

Compare the amount of information available on nursing homes in New York with what is available on drug treatment centers, and you will begin to grasp the extent of the problem state residents face when trying to find a drug rehab bed.
As Kathleen Moore detailed in a recent Post-Star story, the state Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services website allows you to find out where open spots are available for inpatient and outpatient care.
Choosing a drug rehab facility for in-patient care is still a shot in the dark, even though the state is now running a website that tries to update bed availability daily.
Otherwise, the site is unhelpful. It does not list the programs offered at each site. It does not list basic data, such as how well people do after completing a program. It does not even reveal the number of patients who die.
The site allows each program to list more detailed information, but some programs provide information and some don't.
One program Moore checked did not even list the hours during which clients could be admitted.
State inspectors don't visit the rehab centers and rate them on various performance factors and put the results online, the way they do with nursing homes. Hospitals, too, must provide critical data to the state and federal governments, and consumers can find much of this data online.
Without a way to judge the effectiveness of drug treatment programs, patients and their families are left to roll the dice. Peoples' lives are in the balance, but they have no information on which to base a decision and have to rely on luck.
The state is running the website that updates the availability of beds, so why isn't it also providing the information people need to decide where to go?
The administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo has recognized the severity of the opioid crisis and the importance of addressing it primarily as a public health problem, not a criminal justice problem.
In March, the Cuomo administration widened prescription-monitoring, which now includes 25 states and Washington, D.C.; expanded the number of investigators who will be trained to carry and administer naloxone, which can counteract the effects of an overdose; and loosened certification rules on hospitals so they can provide more detoxification services.
This year's state budget includes an opioid tax expected to generate about $100 million per year.
But, as frequently happens in politics, some proposals are more impressive before you know the details. Of that $100 million opioid tax, for example, only about $20 million will go to pay for drug treatment. The rest will go into the state's general fund.
Likewise, having a state website that collects information on rehab centers in a centralized location is an excellent idea, but the execution, so far, is lacking.
Much remains to be done before the official response to opioid addiction matches the severity of the crisis.
Longer residential stays — as long as several months — should become standard, since they have been shown to be most effective. Instead, insurance companies will often cover only shorter stays of two or three weeks.
Longer stays are expensive. State oversight and reporting costs money, too.
But it's important to remember that doing nothing, or not enough, is also costly. If we don't spend public money on treatment, we will be spending it on jail and hospital stays, on police and court services and on caring for children neglected by parents who are addicts.
It is not possible to solve this problem cheaply. But it is possible, with a long-term commitment to drug treatment and prevention, to solve this problem, and it's worth the effort.
The Post-Star