(C) Pennsylvania Capital-Star
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Addiction counselors worry bill targeting dealers could hurt recovery home residents • Pennsylvania Capital-Star [1]
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Date: 2025-06-05 00:05:26+00:00
On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania state Senate advanced a bill that would enhance sentences for certain drug crimes committed within 1,000 feet of a recovery home. The bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and had a first reading before the full Senate.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Wayne Langerholc (R-Clearfield), said it’s intended to deter drug dealers who target people in recovery. But some who work in the field worry it could ultimately impact people seeking treatment, and that increased incarceration has proven ineffective in stemming drug use.
“My initial thought is it could make things worse for the person who’s already struggling and trying to recover,” said Brady Maxton, who owns a treatment center and manages several recovery homes in Lemoyne. “I get the side of, I don’t want people selling drugs to the people at my recovery houses, but I worry. Is it going to help people get more treatment?”
Maxton has been around addiction and recovery his entire life. When he was seven, his parents, one of whom was an addict, opened the New Insights treatment center in Lemoyne. They opened their first recovery home roughly a decade later to provide a space for patients who may otherwise struggle to find stable housing. It’s a business that Maxton now runs.
“As much as I am very much about law and order, and recognize we have laws for a reason, I also grew up around this,” he said. “Just because somebody gets charged or gets a penalty and has to sit in jail for a period of time, that doesn’t mean they’ve had treatment. They just sat in jail, and got out, and can reoffend. It was just a pause in their substance use.”
Langerholc, however, said the law was designed to penalize drug dealers, not patients. He said the specific charges that would have enhanced sentences were based on the kinds of crimes he saw drug dealers charged with when he was an assistant district attorney in Cambria County.
“We would see individuals trying to prey on people going through recovery. It’s absolutely tragic,” he told the Capital-Star. “There’s a big distinction between people who are dealing with addiction and people who are trafficking large amounts of controlled substances in our neighborhoods and communities and, specifically, near our recovery house.”
But Maxton said, at least at his facilities, that isn’t common.
“If the people in the recovery house are going after a drug, typically they’re talking to a coworker or bringing it in that way,” Maxton said. “In most cases when we talk to the people who get caught with this stuff, there’s a lot of shame to it.”
Anyone caught with drugs would almost certainly be evicted, he said, though he’d like to see them placed in another form of treatment, and not necessarily jail.
“To me, it gives the chance to get them in recovery again,” he said. “Yes, they should have some type of consequence, but I don’t think an enhanced consequence specifically for them would be good.”
Sarah Kawasaki, the chief of addiction medicine at Penn State Health and the head of an outpatient opioid treatment center where many patients live in recovery homes, worries that police will not always be able to tell who’s buying or selling.
“I don’t know how the police in real time are supposed to determine who’s living in the halfway house and who’s not, or who’s dealing and who’s buying,” Kawasaki said. “People are making mistakes all the time and the wrong people get put in jail.”
Moreover, she says that increased incarceration has been tried as a method to deal with drug users and dealers alike in the United States, and it’s failed to meaningfully stem drug use or overdose rates. Plus, at the end of the day, she doesn’t believe that anyone should make rules intended to keep recovery homes safer without consulting with professionals.
“I’m not sure that it’s the government’s place to decide what these programs need to help with their safety,” she said. “And I’m not sure that it’s gonna actually make the people living there and trying to do well less safe, versus getting them reincarcerated more easily.”
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