Drug Treatment Facilities and Abortion Restrictions

I. Drug Treatment Facilities
"South Florida -- the densely populated area comprising Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties -- has four hundred and seventy-eight licensed facilities for drug treatment." "In 1986, there were approximately seven thousand treatment facilities for substance abuse in the U.S.; today, there are at least fifteen thousand, a figure that doesn't include most sober homes. In the same period, the addiction treatment industry's  revenue rose from nine billion dollars to more than fifty billion dollars." [1]

"In 1999, seventeen-thousand Americans died from drug overdoses. In 2017, more than seventy- thousand Americans did:  a death count exceeding that at the height of the AIDS crisis." "A patient tested three times a week could generate twenty thousand dollars a month." "The competition for well-insured patients veers into what's known as patient-brokering. The Florida Patient Brokering Act prohibits people and health care facilities from offering any kind of 'commission, bonus, rebate, kickback, or bribe, directly or indirectly, in cash or in  kind,' in exchange for patient referrals.' "

"Many patient-brokers pick up young drug users from the street." "Federal authorities charged a hundred and twenty-four people in South Florida alone, and dozens of sober homes were shut down." "Most young addicts I knew didn't get funerals with a viewing; they were burned to bits in furnaces, and, as others thrown into the ocean or tossed to the wind from a mountaintop."

II. Restricting Abortion
"Abortion had been decriminalized in 1972, with the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, but, with the passage in 1977 of the Hyde Amendment which banned federal funding for almost all abortions, the procedure had become too expensive for many women." "In Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington state, court judges reduced prior sentences if they [the patients] agreed to get birth-control shots  or implants." "That year, ARG Southwest gave funding and assistance to about fifty women each month; it now serves more than three hundred a month. The average cost of an abortion is around five hundred dollars." [2]

"Abortion in Georgia is legal up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and fourteen of the state's clinics are in the Atlanta area." "In South Carolina, there are just three abortion clinics." More than half of the South Carolina women who had abortions in 2017 traveled outside the state for their procedures."

ADDENDUMS:
*President Barshar al-Assad gained more territory in one day than he had in years of fighting Syria's civil war.
*In addition to freezing military aid, the White House froze a separate $141 million aid package for Ukraine, which would have come from the State Department.

Footnotes:
[1] Colton Wootern, "The Florida Shuffle," The New Yorker, October 14, 2019.

[2] Alexia Okebcuo, "Radical Care," The New Yorker, October 14, 2019.