The chalkboard doodle of a little boy comes to life. Filmmaker Benjamin Flaherty confesses that he always felt an unfillable hole deep inside him — the doodle boy’s belly turns white with emptiness — and then he found alcohol.

Two booze bottles pop into the doodle boy’s hands. His eyes light up. He cracks a wide, toothy grin.

Soon, though, a grown doodle man sprawls helplessly on the ground. It’s decades later, after many years of drinking. Flaherty tells us how, that night, he felt his body shutting down. How he was sure he was going to die. How he vowed that, if he woke up, he was going to change his life.

This devastatingly intimate revelation sets the tone for Flaherty’s powerful new film, “Shuffle,” which won the documentary feature jury award at the prestigious SXSW film festival and screened Monday at the Landmark in Westwood, with help from the UCLA Documentary Film Legal Clinic. Set mainly in Florida but slopping over to California and New Jersey and back again — because ping-pong is what happens when people are reduced to commodities whose value depends on relapse, not recovery — it chronicles three struggling users, their agonized parents and insiders-turned-informants who fear for their lives.

Deja vu

It’s a personal take on a story SCNG has been chronicling for eight years, and one Southern Californians know all too well. Susan Rea of San Juan Capistrano was at the screening, and she wept (her son Dean died of an overdose behind a Palm Springs gas station after getting booted from a celebrity rehab). Allen and Rose Nelson of Santa Monica were there, too (their son Brandon was supposed to be in a specialized psychiatric facility to treat serious mental illness, but wound up unattended in an unlicensed sober home where he hanged himself from the ceiling sprinkler), as were activists Wendy McEntyre of Sky Forest (her son Jarrod overdosed in a sober living home) and Jennifer Turner-Barton and so many others whose lives were upended by fraud and death in California’s addiction treatment industry — and are in very personal battles to do something about it. They want, more than anything, for California to change.

The most surprising face in the crowd, to this scribe anyway, was that of Nate Young. Young ran an empire of treatment facilities and sober homes that began to crumble late last year, after insurers stopped paying and several state licenses were revoked. He weaponized addiction for profit, insurance giant Aetna charged in a $40 million federal lawsuit, asserting that his businesses cycled patients from one entity to another and encouraged relapse so billing cycles could start anew. Young countersued Aetna, asserting that it greedily endangered addicts’ lives by cutting treatment short and indefinitely delaying payments.

We’ve spilled a lot of ink over the Young saga but had never met him. His eyes grew wide as I introduced myself, and he cracked a joke about being afraid. He’d love to tell his side of things, he said, but with so many lawsuits pending, he just can’t right now. He did reference public statements he has made earlier about only wanting to help people.

Anyway, several films have been made about the revolving door in the private-pay, insurance-money-fueled, woefully underregulated slice of the addiction treatment market — including the 2015 documentary “The Bu$iness of Recovery” and the 2021 feature “Body Brokers” — but Flaherty’s take is so personal, and its explanation of the industry’s machinations so clear, that every lawmaker in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., should be required to watch and pass a test afterwards.

“When the people who make the policies profit off the policies,” said Flaherty, who found his way to sobriety via Alcoholics Anonymous, “we should question the policies.”

Good intentions

Setup: The well-intentioned Affordable Care Act requires addiction treatment to be covered by health insurance — and eliminates annual and lifetime coverage caps. With laughably low bars to entry, providers proliferate. The lucrative shuffle from detox to residential to outpatient to relapse and back again begins.

Flaherty is the film’s self-reflective narrator, and he spent three years following three people — Cory, Nicole and Daniel — as they made the vicious cycle their lives. Urine was liquid gold, and some had to pee in a cup every day so insurers could be billed thousands of dollars for tests alone. The “patients” were paid a couple of thousand if they finished a couple of weeks of billable treatment in Place A (usually followed by relapse); then paid a couple of thousand more if they finished a couple of weeks in Place B (usually followed by relapse); and so on.

One was trapped in this cycle for a decade. Another’s insurer paid close to $1 million in a single year for worthless care. Friend after friend after friend died of overdose; they knew their own deaths could be as close as the next relapse. What was worse, the agony of being in it or the agony of trying to break free?

“The result of Flaherty simply hearing out people like Cory, Nicole and Daniel is shattering confessions and crescendos, which imbues the film with the kind of urgency that no fact or figure could hope to,” said Variety in its review. “It affords its subjects the chance to be heard, and for once, to not be forgotten.”

State regulators are not doing their jobs overseeing these places, said Rea, Dean’s mother, after the film was over. She wants to see oversight shift from Sacramento to the counties, which can keep a much closer eye on things.

“This (expletive) is not working,” said a furious Rose Nelson after the film. “What is working? Where can you go? Where do you turn?”

California should move all detoxes into a medical, clinical setting — and get them out of residential homes, said her husband, Allen Nelson. The higher standards for public programs should apply to private programs, too. “Why would that be controversial?” he asked.

‘It’s past time’

It would be wonderful if policymakers could have these conversations. The film, produced by Carra Greenberg and with striking animation by Tom Sears, goes next to the Berkshires International Film Festival in Massachusetts, then to the Lighthouse International Film Festival in New Jersey, then to the DC/Dox Festival in our nation’s capital.

The movie’s makers want to spur folks to action. Their “#stoptheshuffle campaign” seeks to address corruption and fraud “through a national initiative focused on public awareness, education and empowerment, promoting a shared responsibility for change and advocating for policy reform in collaboration with community and state leadership.” Led by Flaherty, one of the campaign’s supporters is Orange County’s own Advocates for Responsible Treatment.

“With ‘Shuffle,’ Benjamin Flaherty has pulled back the curtain on what happens when legislators ignore how the vulnerable are preyed upon by for-profit fraudsters,” said Laurie Girand of Advocates for Responsible Treatment. “The stigma in Sacramento is real: Pay no attention to businesses that take money from health insurance, state and federal governments, and exploit people until they die.

“California needs evidence-based treatment with government regulatory oversight, not just handwaving and industry self-dealing, to ensure people get better. It’s past time.”