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[MINILIK SALSAWI]

Renault Shirley remembers the first time he was asked to falsify billing reports for Kentucky’s largest drug rehab center.

He had just returned from a church service in 2023 where the company’s founder and owner, a charismatic Christian from Eastern Kentucky, preached about the value of getting sober to hundreds of clients and staff at Addiction Recovery Care.

Shirley, 58, who led recovery group discussions at ARC, said one of his supervisors told him to submit an invoice for the day’s canceled treatment sessions. With it, Shirley said, he was told to fabricate the details of a group discussion, including quotations from clients, as if they had attended a meeting.

“It was fraud,” Shirley told the Lexington Herald-Leader and ProPublica, adding that he refused. But he said he saw others do it often when they gathered to enter their reports into the billing system.

Shirley and ARC were part of a new economy, a boom fueled by misery and addiction and easy money from government officials desperate to curtail the opioid crisis that was devastating rural America. Kentucky’s payouts for drug treatment became so lucrative that companies bused in clients from other states to fill their treatment centers. READ FULL ARTICLE : https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/09/heal ... propublica