Florida's 'pill mills' were a gateway to the nation's opioid crisis, feeding addiction and overdoses in Appalachia and other states.
In this Feb. 2011 photo a DEA agent escorts Zvi Harry Perper to an awaiting police car after his Delray Pain Management clinic was raided by agents in Delray Beach, Fla. Florida’s ‘pill mills’ were a gateway to the nation’s opioid crisis, feeding addiction and overdoses in Appalachia and other states. They exploded across Florida in the early 2000s and operated for years with little oversight.
The clinics’ doctors did no diagnostic work. They just signed prescriptions and shuffled the “patients” to the clinics’ onsite pharmacies to buy oxycodone and other narcotics at $10 a pill, cash-only. Some pill-mill tourists would visit a dozen or more clinics before returning home with thousands of pills, which would be sold to their neighbors for up to $100 each. Within a few days, many again headed south to buy more.
Even today, Florida struggles with opioid addiction. The state was second only to Ohio in the number of opioid-related overdose deaths in 2017, the most recent year for which official figures are available. “It’s all about cash, cash, cash,” he said then about the pill-mill doctors. “You go, you pay the money, and they’re going to come back and say, ‘Yeah, you’re right, you was hurt.’”
Opioid dealers needed to find a substitute to supply their customers and learned that Florida was the spot for prescription painkillers; advertisements popped up all over the internet and in alternative newspapers.
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