‘Pill mills’ were ‘gas on the fire’ of opioid crisis

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 walkin clinics.

For a while, few in authority did much about it even though it was all done in the open with little oversight.

The clinics started in the 1990s and began proliferating in about 2003, their parking lots filled with vehicles sporting license plates from Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere. The customers were drawn by billboards on southbound interstates advertising quick and easy relief — code for “We’re a pill mill and we’re ready to deal.”

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, cashonly. 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.

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.