Shoshana Walter ’07 exposes “Rehab” scandals

Shoshana Walter ’07 is the award-winning author of “Rehab: An American Scandal,” an investigative journalist at The Marshall Project and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her reporting on the addiction treatment industry. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, NPR and CNN, prompting criminal probes and congressional legislation to address a wide range of issues, from erroneous hospital drug testing to armed guards killing with impunity. She spoke with Mount Holyoke College about her journalistic journey — from her time at MHC to the release of “Rehab.”

You attended Mount Holyoke and majored in American studies with a concentration in ethnic and gender studies. How did the College influence your work as a journalist?

When I entered Mount Holyoke, I knew that I wanted to find a career path where I felt like I was making a difference in the world. There is an expectation at MHC that students will contribute good [to] the world. The liberal arts education expanded my mind in so many ways. Thanks to classes from history to sociology, I learned so much about injustice that I’ve been writing about it ever since. After I took a few journalism classes, I realized that was what I wanted to do, and it set me on this career path. My advisor was Martha Ackmann, a longtime gender studies professor and journalist herself. I did an independent study with her where I pursued journalism around the Pioneer Valley. She edited my stories.

You are an investigative reporter for The Marshall Project, covering the health care, criminal justice and child welfare systems. Can you give an example story?

A lot of my reporting over the past eight years has focused on the unintended consequences of our nation’s drug laws, such as hospital drug testing — what happens when mothers go in to give birth and test positive on a drug test. Almost every state has a mandatory reporting law for substance exposure in the womb, but many hospitals screen patients using drug tests [with] false positive rates as high as 50%. Women have had their children taken from them for positive results from a poppy seed muffin or the fentanyl they received during the epidural in childbirth.

“Rehab: An American Scandal” follows four individuals navigating the addiction epidemic, some as advocates and some as victims. Can you tell me how the book came about and why you chose this format?

About eight years ago, I stumbled across this drug rehab program used by courts throughout Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas, where defendants were given the opportunity to get treatment instead of jail. I learned that the program had been founded by a former poultry industry executive and that [the participants] were sent to work unpaid at dangerous poultry jobs and often injured there. Basically, their sole form of “treatment” was unpaid labor. We found similar programs operating across the country. This initial discovery shocked me. I thought our country had undergone a cultural shift where a lot of lawmakers and court officials acknowledge addiction as a disease, so I was surprised that unpaid labor would be considered treatment. We’re still in a massive drug epidemic that kills thousands every year, and I wanted to write a book to expose what’s not working about our system so that we can fix it and make it more effective. I really wanted to write a suspenseful work of narrative nonfiction. The four people I found are all incredible people who have lived incredible tales, and I follow them throughout the book to unfurl this larger story of the systemic problems of our addiction treatment system.

If there’s one key takeaway for you from writing the book, what is it?

The big takeaway for me is that the treatment system we have is actually contributing to the problem because it’s not actually providing people with what they need to enter and succeed with long term recovery. In fact, most programs are just very short bursts of treatment that fuel relapse rates. Someone who completes a 30-day program is more likely to relapse than someone who didn’t complete one at all. By pushing people through rehab again and again, it’s perpetuating the problem. And I found that what happens after treatment is just as important — and sometimes even more important — than the treatment itself. We live in a country where there are enormous consequences for drug addiction. A criminal record creates enormous difficulty in finding jobs, housing, government benefits and social networks. People can go into high-quality treatment programs, but if they don’t get help to overcome those barriers, relapse is very likely. People get trapped and find it impossible to get out.

What advice would you offer current Mount Holyoke students and alums who want to pursue investigative journalism?

Find mentors. I think that Martha was a huge part of my falling in love with journalism. Still to this day, we’re in touch. She gave me great advice when I was working on my book. No matter what you do, being at Mount Holyoke is such a tremendous opportunity to discover what excites you and what you feel passionately about. If you’re going to spend all your time working on something, it ought to excite you and be what you love to do.