Florida survives on tourism, but a decade ago thousands of visitors made frequent trips to the state not to visit its theme parks or beaches. Instead, they came for cheap and easy prescription painkillers sold at unscrupulous walk-in clinics.
1 / 4Opioid Crisis Florida Pill MillsIn 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 thriving"pill mills" helped seed an overdose epidemic that ended up devastating many of the communities where the pills were sent. This week's release of federal data showing the flow of prescription opioids throughout the U.S. from 2006 through 2012 has again put the spotlight on Florida's pill mill industry, which in hindsight provided a blaring fire alarm about a crisis that eventually would claim tens of thousands of lives every year.
Florida's pill mills"opened fast and furious because there was very little regulation ... and the majority of law enforcement was not trained to handle the movement of legal drugs for illegal purposes," said Lisa McElhaney, then a sheriff's narcotics investigator in Broward County, the epicenter of the pill-mill boom.
A perfect storm helped Florida pill mills take off in the early 2000s, said McElhaney, who is now president of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators. With much of America struggling economically even before the Great Recession, people were willing to risk traveling to Florida to buy pills to sell for huge profits back home.
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