California Complaints About Addiction Treatment

A slight improvement in California law for addressing complaints about addiction treatment

By Tom Horvath, PhD

AB 424 was signed by the governor on 10/3/25. The bill is quite brief! It adds a section (11834.33) to the Health and Safety code about how the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) is to address a complaint from the public about an alcohol or other drug recovery or treatment facility. The primary requirements of this 125-word bill are:

• (a) Within 10 days of the date of the complaint, provide notice to the person filing the complaint that the complaint has been received.
• (b) Upon closing the complaint, provide notice to the person filing the complaint that the complaint has been closed and whether the department found the facility to be in violation of this chapter.

The Digital Democracy CalMatters website lists over 30 organizations or governments that supported the bill, along with several individuals. No one is listed as being in opposition.

Most of the supporters were cities. Based on my experience in the industry, I expect these cities had experienced multiple problems with treatment (and also about sober living facilities, although sober homes are not licensed by DHCS and not subject to this law).

It is astonishing to me that complaints were not already handled in this fashion. How could these basic actions not already have been taken? Possibilities include lack of staff at DHCS (because it is underfunded), the “blame the victim” mentality often found when discussing addiction treatment (“if they had something bad happen in treatment, they probably deserved it”), perhaps back door efforts by the less than diligent treatment operators to make complaining more difficult, and probably other influences.

I suspect the underlying theme of this delay in basic compliant processing is that there is a general neglect of addiction treatment (even in California). We do not think “those people” (those with addictive problems) are worth much effort.

We could address this theme by promoting the idea that “those people” are all of us! Only some of us shade over from addictive behavior (think eating, mating, bonding) into addictive problems, but addictive behaviors themselves are essential to survival.

Addictive problems (with the three I mentioned, or to the almost endless substance and activity options that have arisen in civilization) are mostly on the milder side. Nevertheless, when we think “addiction” we tend to think of the extreme cases, not the majority of cases (and probably not our own addictive behaviors or minor addictive problems).

Ironically, of course, the industry promotes addiction as a disease, while complaining about stigma. Having a disease immediately separates “those people” from everyone else. It may take a long time for the idea that all of us have addictive behavior to catch on.

Liked this article on complaints about addiction treatment? You might also be interested in: Addiction Treatment is Sick, Not the People Treated.