Sober Homes in Palm Beach County Pose a Threat to the Community

By Mae Baltz
A second wave of the Opioid Epidemic in the United States started in 2010, a crisis that

has taken over 450,000 lives since 1999 (CDC 2020). Palm Beach County, Florida quickly

outpaced the national average of opioid deaths by 2015, at which point the sober living industry

was thriving in the space (LiveStories, n.d.), as seen in Figure 1. Sober homes were quickly

recognized by the local governments and members of the surrounding community as dangerous,

but little action has taken place to combat the dilemma since then.

Figure 1: Palm Beach County, Florida, and US Opioid Deaths per 100,000

Sober homes are a final step in the journey towards recovery from substance abuse,

where recovering addicts live with others looking to attain sobriety in residential homes. As the

new wave of the opioid epidemic began a new wave, Palm Beach County was viewed as an ideal

spot for the development of these facilities. Firstly, because South Florida was easily marketable

as a site for paradisiacal recovery, and secondly because the state of Florida does not require
licensing ornor certification in order to operate a sober home. By 2015, Palm Beach County was

host to a new billion-dollar industry: sober living (Beall 2015).

The lack of oversight that entices operators to develop sober homes in Palm Beach,

however, also encourages some to treat occupants of their homes abusively. The vicious cycle

created by this behavior is known as “The Florida Shuffle”. It begins with patient brokering, in

which marketers push addicts towards Florida homes to receive kickbacks from facility owners

(Aronberg 2017). Once patients are procured, operators often engage in insurance fraud by

overcharging for drug tests, abuse, and withholding of treatment medication (Alvarez 2017). All

such behavior fosters relapse, leading patients to restart the recovery cycle, thus producing an

endless supply of patients for the industry to exploit. As Figure 2 illustrates, drug fatalities

quickly increased in the height of the sober living industry in Palm Beach, of which 85.7% were

opioid-related in 2018.

This behavior has not gone unnoticed in the county, but there is little that can be done to

directly bring the matter to a halt. Federal law deems recovering addicts as a protected class
under the Americans with Disabilities Act, guaranteeing their right to housing under the Fair

Housing Act.

There’s still hope for the sober living industry. The Palm Beach County Sober Homes

Task Force was established in 2016, arresting operators and marketers taking part in patient

brokering and other illegal activities. Besides this, there are options for regulation that may

greatly benefit occupants of sober homes. Daniel Lauber, a land use and zoning attorney in

Delray Beach, FL, suggests creating a county certification entity that requires homes within Palm

Beach to follow set standards. Lauber also suggests that the county constructs a restriction on the

clustering of sober homes by “establishing a flexible spacing distance” (Lauber 2020, 21), as

clustering is counterproductive to the success of residents.

Sober homes have the ability to transform lives. Those in favor of regulation maintain

that the only way to ensure that this cycle of relapse becomes one of rehabilitation, is that

regulatory policies must be considered for the recovery industry.

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