Florida has a duty to fix damage of drug scourge

In its sweeping series “Igniting the Heroin Epidemic,” The Palm Beach Post has told the remarkable story of the state of Florida’s key role in this century’s devastating addiction crisis: actions and inactions by uncomprehending state leaders that led to misery in places like Ohio and West Virginia as much as in Delray Beach.

That tragic mistake is now in danger of repeating itself when it comes to addiction treatment.

The evidence amassed by investigative reporter

Pat Beall shows that by letting rogue clinics run unrestrained for years in Palm Beach and Broward counties, the state of Florida opened the floodgates for thousands of people here and — astoundingly — in every other state east of the Mississippi to become dangerously addicted to prescription painkillers such as OxyContin, which had been hyper-marketed to doctors by the avaricious Purdue Pharma.

The state’s passivity was exemplified in 2002, when Marco Rubio, then a state legislator, killed a bill to establish a prescription-monitoring database. Tracking prescriptions would have curbed the orgy of script-writing and doctor-shopping that made the pill mills thrive. The database wouldn’t be approved until 2011 by a slow-to-persuade Gov. Rick Scott. During that lapse, more than 20,800 Floridians died after taking prescription opioids.

And when the state finally did crack down on the pill mills, in 2011, officials failed to anticipate the utterly predictable effect of suddenly cutting off oxycodone to individuals with serious addictions. The habituated turned to the next best thing, heroin — which the notorious Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman had the dark foresight to provide.

The heroin was cheap and it was deadly. Within months of Florida’s clampdown on the pill mills, death rates spiked not just here, but in drug-soaked counties in other states, Beall’s research shows.