Florida “Pill Mills” Multiply, Drug Overdoses Climb
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.”
The number of pain clinics in South Florida has ballooned from 60 to 150 in just the past year, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates. Broward alone has 89 clinics, Siegel said.
Pain management with narcotics is recognized as a legitimate medical practice to quell chronic pain for those with injuries or conditions like arthritis. But investigators and health advocates say many of these clinics are merely pill mills where doctors feed narcotics to 65 patients a day or more.
“This medicine is about profit-making,” said Mark Trouville, special agent in charge of the DEA’s Miami office. “I hate to call them doctors. These people are just out to make money.”
A single physician can dispense hundreds of thousands of pills. In the last six months of 2008, Trouville said, just 45 South Florida doctors dispensed nearly nine million pills of oxycodone — a favorite among drug addicts and traffickers.
Experts blame these clinics for a startling rise in prescription-drug overdose deaths in Florida, including a 107 percent jump in oxycodone deaths in two years.
“The rate [of overdoses] is just incredible,” said George Hime, assistant director of toxicology for the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office. “It is the new epidemic of drug abuse.”
Yet, regulators and police can’t control the problem — handcuffed, they say, by tepid Florida laws that allow these clinics to open in-house pharmacies and sell drugs directly to clients walking in off the street, even from far-away states.
“We are source-supplying many other states. This is literally embarrassing,” Sgt. Lisa McElhaney of the Broward Sheriff’s Office told a recent meeting of a county drug task force. “The system has enabled this.”
