It seems to me that if there is a flood happening, that the wisest course is to stop the water at the source, not just divert it and dam it here and there along the way. Those may truly be “stopgap” measures, but they won’t end the problem.
The same is true with the flood of Oxycodone and Vicodin and other prescription drugs that are flowing into our state from Florida. It’s not exactly next door, but the drug dealers here know where the best spots are to get the stuff, and so that’s where they go.
The tragedy is that Florida has become well-known as a place where a person can get Oxycodin, for instance, filled right on the spot, often with no questions asked! All it takes, then, is for several individuals to spend the time going there and lying and presenting fake prescriptions, and the next thing you know, we have a guy caught in Stamford last April with 6,000 Oxycodone pills in his possession. Six thousand!
A story from November 2011 out of New Haven is calling Florida “ground zero” in the nation’s war against prescription drug abuse.
Each pill can be purchased in Florida for between three and seven dollars apiece. Up in Connecticut they sell for about $40 each, and other areas of the country have reported prices as high as $60 apiece. That’s quite a markup of profit for the small amount of work that it takes to go to Florida and get them, although the risk factor, I’m glad to say, is getting higher.
One wonders just whom they are recruiting to go into pain clinics with cash and medical cards to fake that they are ill. Older citizens, perhaps, who benefit from the sale as well?
Florida is not proud of their reputation, and they are tightening up the laws and joining the databases that keep track of who is prescribing, or getting what and where. Our US Attorney David Fein says that, "That program is an early warning system to see who is prescribing an alarming number of those drugs and what patients are going to various pill mills even in the same day. Without a drug monitoring system it's hard to track that. Florida now has that but until recently they didn't."
In case anyone has forgotten, twenty thousand people in our country from all social classes, areas, and age groups are dying every year from prescription drug abuse.
