Saturday, October 24, 2026 • Cloudy and 79. ☁️

We received 223 votes on the Friday poll, “SGA's incredible streak of scoring at least 20 points ended after nearly two years. What matters more to you?”

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏆 The Thunder winning, no matter who scores (116)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔥 Seeing SGA keep making NBA history (4)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏀 I wanted both! (36)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤷 I don't follow the Thunder. (67)

New poll question at the bottom of today’s newsletter. (You can also suggest a poll question by emailing me at [email protected].)

By Kayla Branch, The Frontier
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Recruiters promised Oklahomans struggling with addiction free treatment and housing in Southern California. Patients described sparse therapy, relapses and being left without a way home as insurers accused treatment providers of fraud.

**

Yolanda and her husband Dustin packed enough fentanyl for the drive to California to avoid getting sick on the road.

One week earlier, a friend the couple called “Pumpkin” told them about a treatment program where they could get new clothes and stay in nice homes. Federal law makes it a crime to offer compensation or gifts to attend a specific drug treatment program. Violators can face up to 10 years in prison and $200,000 in fines. Pumpkin told them everything would be free, the couple said. They just needed to sign up for an insurance plan with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma.

Pumpkin told Yolanda that she had just come back from treatment in California herself. Now she and her daughter helped recruit people to Integrity Recovery Center, Dustin said. The pair would help the couple get to California by arranging insurance and coordinating their travel.

Yolanda and Dustin had both used drugs for years, and were chronically homeless in Oklahoma City. Dustin is nearly blind. Yolanda had tried a different rehab several years earlier. Now, the potent fentanyl showing up in the city scared Yolanda. It seemed like a good time to try sobriety again.

A week later, a woman who worked for the California program arrived in a silver Chevy truck to drive them the nearly 1,400 miles west to Los Angeles.

But the woman had a suspended driver’s license. Police pulled the trio over south of El Reno. Yolanda managed to toss her drugs before police found them, but she got a ticket for possession of paraphernalia. Dustin, growing more concerned about their trip, wanted to call friends to come pick them up and take them back to Oklahoma City. Yolanda, ready to end her fentanyl addiction, took the battery out of his phone.

The truck was impounded. The couple stayed at a motel that the California detox facility paid for, Dustin said. The next day, family friends helped the driver get her truck back, and Yolanda and Dustin finished the three-day trip in withdrawal in the backseat. One clinician told The Frontier that severe dehydration can make it dangerous to detox from fentanyl without medical supervision.

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