There were times where I was tied with both hands to the bedpost like this.
And both legs. I'm naked and he would inject me with either heroin or he would put a
crack pipe to my mouth and light it for me.
I was only 19 and I was just
no longer a human being. I was property.
This story starts in Florida, the rehab capital of America.
It begins with Simone, a 23 year old, addicted to heroin and crack cocaine
who's been bought and sold by fraudulent halfway homes
and drug treatment centers across the state.
In three years
I've been to 245 halfway houses, what we call flop houses.
"Simone" is one of thousands caught
in a corrupt system of recovery facilities that illegally make millions
from addicts insurance policies.
So who are the people buying and selling
addicts?
They call them "body snatchers" or "junkie hunters" and many of these hunters
are after something much darker.
That's Ted Padich, he's the lead investigator on the sober home task
force in Palm Beach County.
So why urine samples? Well, to understand it we need to go back to the
Affordable Healthcare Act and the Parity Act which in 2010
required insurance policies to cover substance abuse.
After all the votes have been tallied, health insurance reform becomes law in the United States of America.
Providing insurance coverage to treat addiction is necessary, but without regulation, scam
artists are taking advantage of the system by running excessive and
unnecessary tests, namely urine analysis.
For a single $30 store-bought
urine test, you could get up to $1,500 in payouts from insurance companies.
Let's do the math: if you run five tests a week on a single addict, that's $7,500.
Six addicts at five tests a week, $45,000.
That's over 2.3 million a year and the
numbers keep going up.
And even after insurance companies started to catch on,
these treatment centers would find other things to charge for: STD checks, massage
therapy, pregnancy tests and even DNA testing.
And there you have it, an illegal
money-making operation with multi-million dollar potential all based
on how many addicts you have and how often they pee.
So that explains the
insurance fraud, but there's another layer to the scam.
"Simone" was at an AA meeting in New Jersey
when she was approached.
I was desperate and you could
tell by how I sat in the back of the room.
And this woman approached me
and I told her I can't keep a needle out of my arm and I'm 19 years old.
The first question she asked me is if I had health insurance and she gave me the
information to this treatment center within 48 hours, I was on a plane.
So, why would a treatment center pay for a free flight to Florida?
This is where the body snatchers come in.
These are people paid by the treatment centers and sober homes
to bring in more addicts.
They can be marketers on the internet or snatchers on the ground hunting for addicts and AAA meetings or
at local coffee shops.
And the hub of all this: Delray Beach.
This past year I stayed at a flophouse on Swinton Ave in Delray Beach.
I stayed there for over five and a half months smoking crack and shooting heroin
every single day and they just ran my insurance. My mother still receives bills.
Simone's mother's showed me stacks of actual bills from these flop houses,
showing up to five year urine tests a week and charging her insurance over a
hundred and fifteen thousand dollars for a five month period.
If you have a good
insurance program, you're a gold mine.
What we call Body Snatchers,
they are preying on the most vulnerable people there are and they will lure them
with cash, with gym memberships, drugs. To further complicate it
each relapse those insurance benefits start anew.
And flop houses will actually
pay you to relapse just to restart your benefits.
When I was struggling I would you know
put make a Facebook status or something like I need help, I'm gonna die. I'm scared.
And I would have people reach out to me just be like listen, you go to this
treatment center, I'll give you a little bit of money.
Zoe was first given opioids
at a hospital when her appendix was taken out at the age of 15.
I remember my mom just
standing over me, and I was like, I like this.
I'm sorry.
And then after that I kind of dabbled a little bit, until my mom got
diagnosed with cancer. She started getting allotted and I would army crawl
into her bedroom and I would just pour about 30 or 40 of them into my hand.
I was sixteen. Fully addicted to opiates and I remember I was laying on the couch
and my dad came home early from work he said so you want to go see your mom
today we don't think she's gonna make it through the night I just was like nah
I'm good, like, I'm gonna stay here. I was high.
He came home later that night and he said your mom died. The next day I went and
used heroin for the first time.
Like Simone, Zoe was lured to Florida by a marketer
who profited from her referral but the story gets more complicated.
Addicts who were lured in become more than commodities for their health
insurance policies, many women become trapped in a sex trafficking scheme that
cushions the profit of some of these owners.
So this is the area that I was in
and this is Northwest 13th where I was.
I haven't been back here in a while
this is the park that I tried to hang myself in.
My mother tried to pull me out of that house and they didn't know that
I couldn't leave for two reasons. Not only am I hooked to crack cocaine but I am
somebody's property and I cannot leave.
With help from her parents, Simone escaped from that flophouse and is now a student at Palm Beach State College
She says her classmates have no idea
that she's one of thousands of women and men lost in what they call "the Florida Shuffle."
We're about to go to the Motel 6 it's great for trafficking because the
highway is right there.
When women come down here they do in fact become sort of
the property and a commodity that's to be traded it's like a hellhole,
where they end up powerless, no options, in the hands of people who are going to trade them.
There are girls that are 12-13 years old.
We hear that they're being passed
around groups of girls that are moved from place to place treated like chattel
authorities have made over 30 arrests in just the last year. The most infamous of
these cases was that of Kenny Chapman, who pled guilty to multiple counts of
money laundering, insurance fraud and sex trafficking,
Susan has represented some of his victims
So he would actually market them in houses of prostitution.
He was also giving them drugs to have them relapse so they could go to a
higher level of care and he would make a higher profit.
I ended up in one of Kenny Chapman's houses. He had the houses so that they
were not only able to be locked on the inside, they were able to be locked on
the outside. The windows had locks on them. If we did something that he didn't
like, he'd lock in a room or he'd sell you for dirt cheap. He would let you know
that four people just ran through you for $20
he would let you know that four men just ran a train on you for $20
he'd let you know and he'd let you sit there and think about that.
Wouldn't even get you high.
Because now you want to get high just to be numb.
Just to not feel,
to not think.
I sat in a bathtub and filled it with scorching hot water and a gallon of bleach.
And I sat there just scrubbing
Because I wanted it to get off.
I wanted it to just go away
it didn't
Chapman has been sentenced to 27 years but Simone says they're more like him.
I've found hundreds of other women that have experienced this whether it's been
through halfway house shuffling, being sold, being used as property, being prostituted.
It almost becomes like a sisterhood.
The thing is treatment can be life-saving for some addicts.
And there are good sober home owners and treatment centers
actually trying to help people but unless they're willing to take
kickbacks, many are forced to shut down. Sometimes I would get a client in
everything is fine. You go around 2 days later, and they're gone.
I've had people offer me a lot of money to bring my clients to a
different treatment center. The climate of recovery down here, it's
just not worth it - to me - here anymore. But Florida isn't
alone. Flophouses and fraudulent treatment centers are popping up rapidly
throughout the country and the consequence is a dramatic increase of
overdoses and deaths and while law enforcement has cracked down on
treatment centers in Florida the problem is spreading to other states. Not just
the Florida shuffle anymore, it's the California shuffle, the Arizona shuffle
the North Carolina shuffle, the New Hampshire shuffle. It's everywhere, I mean
it is a horror story if you aren't paying attention
if this isn't in your town today, it will be tomorrow.
I was almost three years sober when I relapsed a few weeks ago.
I don't want to be a statistic. Hope I don't end up killing myself
because that's the reality of this place.
I want to see the day I turn 30.
That's what I want. I just want to make it to 30.