Rehab Riviera: Heart-rending testimony pushes reform bills forward

Rehab Riviera: Heart-rending testimony pushes reform bills forward

Someone passed a box of tissues to Sequoyah Thiessen. Child abuse, she told the Senate Health Committee, drove her to drugs at age 15. But at 22, she vowed to get sober. Thus began a hellish descent into California’s private-pay, insurance-money-fueled segment of the addiction treatment system. “Treatment,” she told the senators, was an oxymoron there. She endured violence, sexual harassment, emotional manipulation, cult-like environments, grote…