Florida's 'pill mill' clinics multiply, drug overdoses climb

[babylonsister]

Broward's pill mills: Clinics multiply, drug overdoses climb

BY SCOTT HIAASEN
[e-mail]


Broward County has become the painkiller capital of the United States, the notorious home to a cottage industry of storefront pain clinics selling alarming numbers of narcotics and feeding a brazen black market sprawling through the South and New England.

In the last six months of 2008, doctors at Broward's pain clinics handed out more than 6.5 million pills of the potent painkiller oxycodone -- almost four pills for every Broward resident, according to federal data compiled by the Broward Sheriff's Office.

Pills flow by the thousands every day through an ever growing number of clinics offering drugs and prescriptions to walk-in patients at strip malls and nondescript office parks -- some with armed guards stationed by the clinic doors. One Fort Lauderdale clinic has taken over a defunct drive-through fast-food restaurant.

Many clinics lure patients with the promise of drugs sold on site, and with coupons and discounts advertised in the back pages of alternative weekly newspapers, or on bus benches and billboards.

''Out of State Patients Welcome,'' blares a recent ad for A1 Pain in Fort Lauderdale. ''No Wait for Walk-Ins,'' another clinic's ad says. One doctor offers a $25 gasoline coupon to the weary, pain-afflicted traveler.

And the travelers come -- by the thousands, narcotics investigators say, from Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Massachusetts and other states. Prospective pill buyers sometimes camp outside clinics overnight, waiting for the doors to open, said Hollywood police Capt. Allen Siegel, director of a South Broward narcotics task force.

''Broward County has become the Colombia for pharmaceutically diverted drugs,'' Siegel said. ``We're supplying everywhere.''

more...

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/broward/v-fullstory/story/985068.html

[Warpy]

1. Maybe if the DEA would stop leaning on doctors who treat people in pain

there would be no need for these outlets!

Untreated pain kills. The DEA, having been unsuccessful at keeping illegal drugs out of the country, has been leaning on doctors who write legal prescriptions for people in pain for years. Some doctors have had their licenses to practice lifted only because they treated pain as the serious issue it is.

This is an example of why we need to end the drug war. We lost. The drugs won. All we ever got out of it was misery, the incarceration of too many young people for life, and the loss of civil liberties.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. What he said and more. "Too many young people for life" it doesn't

get worse than that.

[jmowreader]

3. This isn't about pain

The reason the DEA is leaning on doctors who treat people in pain is because of these scumbags. They're not prescribing pills to people in pain. They are the reason Oxycontin is called Hillbilly Heroin.

How the scam works: Someone...oh, pick any freeper username...wants to move out of his mom's basement and go into a profitable line of work. He borrows some money, travels to Florida and hires a handful of homeless people to get Oxycontin prescriptions, and he gets some too--you know the various Dr. Feelgoods down there are not communicating between themselves. He brings the Oxy back to his area and sells it to people who want to get high on it. A week or a month later, he does it again. There are enough doctors in this business, if he's careful he doesn't have to use any one doctor enough times to arouse their suspicions. After a few trips, he's got a very nice racket going.

Enough of this, and the never-reactive DEA believes any MD who writes a lot of Oxycontin prescriptions is a Dr. Feelgood, even if she's just an oncologist whose patient population is by definition in the kind of pain Oxycontin was created to treat. For some reason I can't fathom, the actual Dr. Feelgoods rarely seem to attract the attention of the DEA.

[nashville_brook]

10. while this story may not be about pain, it has ramifications for people with chronic pain are severe

we're already treated like criminals on top of our neverending pain. we've been pushed out of the care of REAL docs who can actually do something about the source of our pain, into these drive-thru drug houses where your condition isn't given any thought -- just the prescription or the possibility of giving you expensive spinal injections.

as these stories accumulate, the people who deal with the consequences are the pain patients who are seen AS A THREAT to their docs, and the docs who are seen as crooked (if they dare treat pain) by the "authorities."

i just had a doctor appt this week, and noticed there was a giant memo taped to the admission window. it was three pages of how my doc would no longer treat chronic pain with any narcotic. i'm lucky, i guess, b/c i'm responding to a treatment that is considered non-narcotic. otherwise i would have to go back into the "pain clinic" culture -- and outcome that is too depressing to think about after having gone thru it.

it's all fine and good for people who don't have chronic pain to sit on the sidelines and declare that these stories have nothing to with us real pain patients... do it all you want. but know that to pain sufferer, this sounds about as ugly as it gets. this IS about us because we're the people who're punished for it. not the criminals or the crooked system.

[dysfunctional press]

17. looking for a new dr. is never fun, when one of the first questions is does he prescribes narcotics?

or- when you call to get your prescription re-written(they CANNOT be called in, and there are NO refills- you need a new hand-written prescription EVERY month) and your dr. is on vacation, so the guy covering for him treats you like a junkie, and will only write you a prescription to cover the week until your dr. returns...:grr:

i went to a pain clinic once up here in the chicago-area...it seemed like a really sleazy place, especially for it's oakbrook location, and it seemed like they treated everyone who walked thru the door as a junkie trying to score a fix. i didn't return.

i currently take 50-70mg. of methadone/day for chronic pain, plus i average a couple of vicoprofens a day for migraines. and about an oz. of weed/week.

[nashville_brook]

12. these clinics are a direct response to the 'outsourcing of pain' -- they've relieved themselves

from treating pain. so, go into an ER with severe pain, and see how you're treated. unless you have an obvious injury like a gunshot wound or broken limb, you're going to get the hairy eyeballs b/c you're threatening someone's career by *possibly* being a drug seeker.

i would love to have the stats on how many people have died b/c docs didn't believe they were "legitimate" patients. i was almost in that category.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

4. A friend of mine

told me just a couple of weeks ago about a trip he took to one of these places with a friend of his. His friend carried his medical file, documenting his back surgery from a year before.

My friend said it looked like a cross between "Deliverance" and the bar scene from "Star Wars."

For two hundred bucks, his friend got a couple of scrips for oxycodone and one for Percocet, as I recall.

Now, of course, pharmacists don't have any oxycodone on hand and don't know when it's going to be delivered, and no one knows why.

The irony, the irony .................

[TahitiNut]

5. "almost four pills for every Broward resident"?? So what? That's NOTHING.

Over a period of six months - 180 days - that's about the medication level needed for a victim of chronic pain. Taken every four hours, that volume would be the needs of FAR LESS THAN 1% of the people in that area. Far more than 1% are in chronic pain.

[JeanGrey]

8. I have stage four cancer that has spread to the bone.

I take 10 mg timed release Oxycontin every eight hours plus two 5's for immediate pain up to every four. A prescription of 90 doesn't last long. And those meds will have to be upped soon.

That isn't that many pills.

[TahitiNut]

13. !

:hug:

[JeanGrey]

16. That isn't much at all! Terminal cancer patients take MUCH

higher doses. My friend who is also stage four takes 150 mg. of morphine a day along with other meds. Thank god I have a compassionate doctor, if the pain gets to overwhelm me I go to the infusion center and I get a big shot of dilaudid in my port. The only time I'm out of pain, the ten minutes right after that shot. Unfortunately you can't do that every day. I wish.

[nashville_brook]

11. exactly -- it's flabby logic b/c there's no correlation btwn # of pills and degree of criminality

docs often prescribe low dose pills (100 5mg instead of one 500mg pill) so the patient can take only what they need. i get 180 pills a month b/c i'm supposed to take 3 doses throughout the day consisting of 2 pills. if you averaged that out by the demographic of my street, you would get an OMG statement such as "that's almost 4 pills per resident of Cypress Ridge Dr!!" (especially considering how many empty, foreclosed houses there are on my street.)

OMG!! "that's almost 4 pills per Broward resident!!!"

in addition to these mythical pill cowboys, you know who also lives in Broward county? retirees - a population that is likely to have more people in pain management than say a small college town. for this stat to make any sense you'd have to believe that no one else in Broward Co takes pain meds. at the very least you should be able to provide a corresponding number of what would be considered a reasonable # of pills for THE KIND OF POPULATION that lives in that area. so, you'd be comparing retirees to retirees.

this is the worst kind of scapegoating and fear mongering there is.

[TahitiNut]

14. It's deeply saddening how math-illiterate we are.

On top of that, most have no idea how many folks suffer chronic pain. Insane.

[sixmile]

15. You should spend a couple days here

See for yourself how many 'legitimate' patients are using these pill mills.

[Uben]

6. I have hydrocodone

I probably have 100 or 150 hydrocodone tablets in differing strengths. Between my wife's breast cancer surgery and two subsequent reconstruction surgeries, her knee surgery, and my broken leg surgeries, we have amassed quite a supply of pain killers. The problem, if you wanna call it that, is neither of us will take the damned things unless we are in extreme pain. The subsequent constipation from taking one isn't worth frequent use. When we do take one, we have to take a vegetable laxative at the same time so we are not stopped up for three or four days!

Don't ask, my wife doesn't throw any drugs away, no matter how old they get! She keeps them locked in our safe like they're some kinda "booty" or something. My drug of choice is ALLEVE. It makes my infrequent knee pain go away without the stoppage!

[madrchsod]

7. i was given hydrocodone for my shoulder surgery..yuck

i took them two days and switched to regular codeine. now i`m taking 800mg of ibuprofen. yes the constipation is sometimes worse than the dam recovery.

[JeanGrey]

9. Your wife needs to get rid of that old medicine. Old medicine

can be quite dangerous. Many of them turn into bad stuff after the expiration date!