Megan Burks
Speak City Heights reporter and web editor
Speak City Heights reporter and web editor
If you're pitching a story that’s going to take you off deck for dailies, it helps to have two things: a great character and a clear wrongdoer. When I decided to look into a shortage of residential addiction treatment facilities in California’s Imperial County, I thought I had those ironed out.
"I overdosed on heroin and I was staying in a motel," Susan Ireland says on a tour of El Centro. "The guy that worked at the motel found me, raped me and called the cops. I woke up in the hospital two weeks later, clean and sober and pregnant. That's why I'm clean and sober today."
In 1965, the deinstitutionalization of mental health treatment charted a path toward overcrowded prisons and a shortage of mental health treatment facilities. Today, Imperial County in California is dealing with both of those consequences.