Author Topic: How Florida spread oxy across half of America  (Read 1323 times)

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How Florida spread oxy across half of America
« on: July 12, 2018, 11:46:55 am »
MetroWest Daily News By Pat Beall 7/8/2018

Reliably red on the political map, Huntington is a West Virginia town with a 191-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 as a freshman, 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 be 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 the tiny town crowded into vans and headed south, where Palm Beach and Broward counties were home to hundreds of pill mills — clinics where anyone with a fake ache and hard 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, Tennessee, 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 drug users and dealers in the Great Lakes, New England and Mid-Atlantic regions as well as the Southeast, DEA records show, an area spanning virtually every region 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.

More: http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20180708/how-florida-spread-oxy-across-half-of-america