OXY CRACKDOWN SMALL COMFORT TO ONE MOTHER

One son: dead from an oxy overdose. Another son's wife: also dead from
oxycodone.

Year after futile year of traveling to Tallahassee on her own expense
to beg legislators to get a grip on Florida's storefront pain pill
bazaars.

When a bill designed to regulate pain pill clinics finally passed its
final committee review Monday, Maureen Barrett was not exactly in a
victorious mood. "Eleven deaths a day," she said, summarizing the
brutal cost of procrastination. "It's about time."

To a mother like Barrett, a tireless worker for the United Way of
Broward County's task force on narcotic overdose prevention and a
witness to oxy devastation in the community and her own family, it has
been almost surreal knowing cash-only storefront peddlers of narcotic
pain killers have long been allowed to proliferate.

By the 2009 legislative session, the evidence had become too
overwhelming to ignore, even for legislators whom Barrett dismissed in
the past as "clueless." Unregulated pain docs were out of control,
catering to addicts and drug dealers, many from the 38 states with
saner regulations.

Can't Be Ignored

Not even the clueless could ignore: Eleven fatal overdoses a day in
Florida. Broward County with 38 of the nation's top 50 doctors
prescribing oxycodone (prescribing 6.5 million pills in just six
months). Storefront clinics with cash-only businesses and come-on ads,
dishing out pills for the sketchiest of injuries.

Yet the pill-doc insanity festered. Proposals to require monitoring
systems that would prevent "patients" from going doctor shopping
from one pain clinic to another, collecting multiple prescriptions,
died for seven straight years in legislative committees.

Bernd Wollschlaeger, president of the Miami-Dade Medical Association,
has been a fierce advocate for regulating pain clinics. I asked him
why it has taken so long. "Because many of my peers still believe
that we can self-regulate the pain-clinic docs." He called pain docs
"drug dealers seeking a huge profit by prescribing as many pills as
they can. Many of them are failed docs with no other credentials but
board certification in predatory medicine."

Furious Message

Wollschlaeger, in a furious message to his association members,
referred to the cash-only faux-injury pain clinic practioneers as
modern versions of South Florida's "narco cowboys."

Barrett wondered if it was the embarrassment caused by the mounting
complaints from law enforcement and medical officials in other states
that finally has pushed the Florida Legislature into action. In recent
weeks, Florida has been pummeled by news stories about drug dealer
rings and oxy overdoses in several states -- all linked to
prescriptions issued in South Florida pain clinics. "We're inundated
with it. Florida is killing us," Sheriff Bill Lewis of Lewis County,
Ky., complained to The Miami Herald's Scott Hiaasen, in a quote that
resounded across the country.

Of course, that's essentially who we've become -- oxy purveyors to the
nation. But pain-clinic monitoring bills will come up for a vote in
both the House and Senate this week or next.

"Finally," Barrett said. She sounded more weary than triumphant.