Dangerous doctors: Pain pill physicians keep prescribing, despite state charges

As Florida emerged as the epicenter of the nation’s prescription drug crisis nearly a decade ago, when pain clinics popped up in neighborhoods and loose rules let people sweep up painkillers by the score, state lawmakers vowed to crack down.

Despite the tough talk, Florida health regulators have allowed doctors they accuse of improperly prescribing painkillers to keep doling out pills for years.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel identified at least 50 doctors who remain free to prescribe while state cases against them linger, some for as long as eight years.

These unresolved cases reveal some of the state’s most confounding doctor regulation issues.

Though state law requires prosecutors with the Department of Health to expedite cases that are older than a year, the cases against each of these doctors are more than

a year old. They include doctors who have racked up new charges while their initial cases sat untouched. And they make up some of the health department’s oldest unresolved cases against doctors.

The findings are the latest in a Sun Sentinel investigative series that has exposed a system that is slow to punish doctors accused of endangering patients, reluctant to suspend them after charges are filed, and quick to let them off the hook with settlement deals.

“I am very concerned about the issues your investigative reporting has uncovered,” state Sen. Dana Young, R-Tampa, who heads the Senate’s health policy committee, said in a statement about the series. “I have raised this issue with the Department of Health and have asked them to provide options to us where we can put more teeth into the enforcement apparatus.”