FLORIDA SPREADS OXY ACROSS AMERICA
Loosely regulated pain clinics led Florida to become the supplier of choice, feeding the nation’s appetite for opioids
Reliably red on the political map, Huntington is a West Virginia town with a 182-year-old university, a storied football team and more than 100 churches.
It’s where Will Lockwood graduated from high school. It’s where he enrolled at Marshall University.
It’s where he first tried OxyContin.
By the time Lockwood entered Marshall, Detroit dealers were trickling into Huntington, selling OxyContin and pills with OxyContin’s active ingredient, oxycodone.
Even though Lockwood could step out his front door and get the drug, Detroit street dealers weren’t the preferred supplier. Florida was.
It may have been 1,000 miles away, but to Lockwood, getting OxyContin and oxycodone from Florida’s loosely regulated pain clinics “was legal, in a sense.”
Twice a month, different “crews” from Huntington crowded into vans and headed south, where Palm Beach and Broward counties were home to more than 200 pill mills — clinics where anyone with a fake ache and cash could walk out with pills and prescriptions.
After hitting a string of clinics, the Huntington crews drove back with “around 500 to 600 pills per person,” said Lockwood.
But it wasn’t just a few hundred pills. It was tens of thousands. And it wasn’t just Huntington. The West Virginia vans were part of a nationwide caravan heading to South Florida. Cars bearing tags from Kentucky, Ten-
nessee, the Carolinas, Virginia and Ohio crowded into one clinic parking lot after another, loading up on pills and prescriptions.
News stories and law enforcement focused on those “parking lot” states in Appalachia, where dealers and addicts with a tank of gas or a cheap plane ticket traveled the “Oxy Express” to Palm Beach and Broward.
But Florida’s pill pipeline reached far beyond those roadways.
By 2010, Florida was the oxycodone drug dealer of choice for users and dealers in the Great Lakes, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions as well as the Southeast, DEA records show, an area spanning virtually every state east of the Mississippi.
It wasn’t just that Florida guaranteed a flow of cheap oxycodone. For 10 years, key lawmakers and agency heads repeatedly looked the other way as crooked doctors and bogus clinics flooded almost half the nation with the highly addictive drug.
In failing to crack down, Florida extended by years the amount of time highly addictive oxycodone would be available to both first-time users and addicts. It gave criminals the raw materials for trafficking.
It gave Will Lockwood the OxyContin needed to feed his growing habit.
It paved the way for his eventual jump to heroin.
Jumping state lines
Teenage high-school wrestling buddies in New Port Richey ran oxycodone into Tennessee; they were paid with cash hidden in teddy bears. A Hillsborough County man mailed 17,000 pills to Glen Fork, W.Va., a month’s supply for every man, woman and child in the tiny town.
A Boston Chinatown crime boss trafficked pills from Sunrise into Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and South Carolina. Wellington twins and pill mill kingpins Chris and
Jeff George oversaw one of the largest operations in the country from their five Palm Beach and Broward clinics, pushing oxycodone into Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and South Carolina.
A husband and wife team operating out of a Forest Hill Boulevard clinic funneled pills to Delaware. At Palm Beach International Airport, two federal security agents accepted $500 a pop each time they waved through thousands of pills bound for Connecticut and New York.
A Palm Bay man’s Puerto Rican family bought local pills destined for the working-class town of Holyoke, Mass. In Rhode Island, police pulled over a Lauderhill man caught speeding through Providence. They found 903 oxycodone tablets and 56 morphine pills in the car.
Senior citizen and Tulane business graduate Joel Shumrak, of Boca Raton, funneled more than 1 million pills into eastern Kentucky from his South Florida and Georgia clinics, much of it headed for street sales — an estimated 20 percent of the illicit oxycodone in the entire state.
Van loads of pill-seekers organized by “VIP buyers” traveled from Columbus, Ohio, to three Jacksonville clinics, where armed guards handled crowd control and doctors generated prescriptions totaling 3.2 million pills in six months. In Miami, Vinny Colangelo created 1,500 internet names to entice drug users throughout the nation to one of his six South Florida pain clinics or pharmacies.
Even the Mafia got in on the Florida oxy action: A Bonanno crime family associate oversaw a local crew stocking up on Palm Beach and Broward pain clinic oxycodone, upstreaming profits to the New York family.
At times, it seemed almost no section of the country was free of Florida-supplied pills: When Olubenga Badamosi was arrested driving his Bentley Continental in Miami in 2011, the Oregon man was one of two traffickers overseeing a crew smuggling South Florida oxycodone to sell in Salt Lake City, Seattle and Denver as well as Oregon, Nevada, Texas and even Alaska.
Pharmacy delivers oxy ‘pot of gold’
It would be hard to overstate Florida’s role in feeding the country’s voracious appetite for oxycodone.
Oxycodone 30-milligram tablets were favored by addicts. And in 2009 and 2010, roughly four of every 10 of those pills were sold in Florida.
Small wonder: Of the nation’s top 100 oxycodone-buying doctors, 90 were in Florida.
They were keeping busy. In the first six months of 2010, Ohio doctors and other health care practitioners bought the second-largest number of oxycodone doses in the country: just under 1 million.
Florida’s bought 40.8 million.
Of the country’s top 50 oxycodone-dispensing clinics, 49 were in Florida. From August 2008 to November 2009, a new pain clinic opened in Broward and Palm Beach counties on average every three days, a Broward County grand jury found.
Pharmacies, too, ordered jaw-dropping numbers of pills from drug distributors, the middlemen between manufacturers and pharmacies.
Cardinal Health, one of the nation’s biggest distributors, sold two CVS pharmacies in Sanford a combined 3 million doses of oxycodone, flooding the town of 54,000 with an average of 250,000 oxycodone pills every month.
West of Jupiter, a Walgreens drug distribution center sold 2.2 million tablets to a single Walgreens pharmacy in tiny Hudson, a roughly six-month supply for each of its 12,000 residents. It shipped more than 1.1 million pills to each of two Fort Pierce Walgreens pharmacies.
For 40 days starting in late 2010, the distribution center shipped 3,271 bottles of oxycodone — 327,100 doses of the drug — to a Port Richey Walgreens pharmacy, prompting a distribution manager to ask: “How can they even house this many bottles?”
They weren’t keeping them on the shelves. They were selling them rapidly.
On average in 2011, a U.S. pharmacy bought 73,000 doses of oxycodone in a year.
By contrast, a single Walgreens pharmacy in the Central Florida town of Oviedo bought 169,700 doses of oxycodone in 30 days.
People on both sides of the counter knew what was going on: In a letter to the chief executive of Walgreens, Oviedo’s police chief warned that people were walking out of the town’s two Walgreens stores and selling their drugs on the spot, crushing and snorting them, or — still in the pharmacy’s parking lot — injecting them.
In Fort Pierce, a Walgreens pharmacist accidentally provided an extra 120 oxycodone pills to a customer. When the druggist called to ask that the man return the pills, the customer’s girlfriend bluntly responded that he was an addict, that he sold oxycodone and the 120 pills were “a pot of gold,” DEA records show.
That was in September. The same man came back to the same Walgreens in December
2010: OF THE NATION’S TOP 100 OXYCODONE-BUYING DOCTORS, 90 WERE IN FLORIDA