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...nation's top 25 oxycodone-dispensing doctors were all in Florida in the first half of 2008; 18 of them were in Broward County, according to a Broward County state attorney grand-jury report. In South Florida overall, there were 176 pill mills, up from 66 just 14 months before. This has contributed to tourism - pill-shopping trips to the Sunshine State from Tennessee and Kentucky, where authorities have cracked down hard on similar clinics, seem to be as common as Disney vacations nowadays. In the parking lot of the Broward Pain Clinic, there are just as many license plates...
...Broward County sheriff Al Lamberti says he isn't sure why his jurisdiction has become the hotbed. "There's no reasonable explanation," he says. "It seems like it's just happened. I don't know why. Maybe we have better beaches, I don't know." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...clinics continue their march northward. The latest front line is Palm Beach County, just north of Broward County. That county had 372 suspected overdose deaths from legal pain pills in 2009, up from 248 in 2005, according to published reports. Alarmed by the spread of the clinics, Palm Beach County commissioners just passed a moratorium to keep new clinics from opening while officials try to hammer out a solution. Other local governments are passing similar moratoriums. A commissioner in one city, Delray Beach, wants to require patients to be fingerprinted when they pick up their pills, for better monitoring...
...legislating good intentions is one thing. Real solutions are harder to come by. Although the state has approved a database to track pill dispensing, there is no dedicated funding source - the legislation merely gave officials the ability to seek grants for it. The Broward County grand-jury report concluded that the monitoring program should be "swiftly implemented and adequately funded, by any means necessary." But that's a tall order in a state hard hit by the recession. (See the most common hospital mishaps...
Case in point: a man outside the Broward County clinic who says he makes the 11-hour drive from Tennessee every month just to get his medication. He says he is prescribed medicine for chronic neck pain stemming from a forklift injury but cannot get the medicine he needs anywhere near his home. He won't divulge what he is prescribed. "I'd rather not say, but it's helping me," he says. "I'm not a junkie." The medicine allows him to keep working as an excavator, he says. "They help people that can't get medication that they...