The Tip of the Iceberg

Attached an article from today's Miami Herald highlighting the arrest of several oxycontin dealers, wrongly called "doctors", Unfortunately, they represent just a tiny sample of the hundreds of drug dealers in white coat in South Florida who make millions in ill-gotten profits.
Meanwhile, the Oxy-Cartels are reinventing their business model and open "life style enhancement" and " wellness" clinics.
We have to stop them now!
Yours
Bernd



The Miami Herald
Posted on Wed, Feb. 23, 2011
Pill-mill arrests hit right target: doctors

Fred Grimm
fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com
Law enforcement tested a promising antidote for Florida’s oxy epidemic Wednesday – doctors in handcuffs.

Arrests of so many drug-addled users and low-rent street dealers hardly matters. Not compared to that ignominious image of Dr. Zvi Harry Perper led out of a “pain management clinic” in Delray Beach Wednesday. That stuck at the very nub of the pill-mill industry. In tan scrubs and steel cuffs. Dr. Perper on a perp walk.

Fifteen pill mills were raided in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. A few oxy street dealers and a handful of clinic employees were arrested, all replaceable entities in the pill-mill business model. But five doctors were busted. Seven others “voluntarily” surrendered their federal license to prescribe narcotic medicines. Doctors, cranking out oxycodone prescriptions for phantom pain and fake injuries, are the essential elements.

While a doctor may be a crucial to a pill mill, actual doctoring is just a bother. Undercover agents, posing as patients, were prescribed hundreds of oxycodone pills without so much as an examination by Dr. Jeffrey Lipman at Midtown Pain Management in Miami-Dade, according to Lipman’s arrest warrant.

It was easy to see why the DEA might have been suspicious of Lipman’s bedside manner. In the first six months of 2010, he ordered up 288,560 oxy pills for his patients. (There are more prolific oxy docs in the United States. All 39 of them work out of South Florida pill mills.)

The agents told the doc of prior drug abuse and taking oxy with alcohol. They described only minimal pain. In Dr. Lipman’s waiting room, another patient, who said he planned to sell his pills in North Carolina, asked an agent (who he thought was from Tennessee), “How easy was it to sell up there?” The doctor even discussed the “street value” of the oxy he was dispensing with the undercover agents. He figured $8 to $16 a pill.

Medical experts cited in the arrest warrant described Lipman’s clinic as “consistent with those of the usual pill mill, where cash is the only form of payment, patients often travel from long distances and sell prescribed controlled substances , physical examinations are not performed . . . and controlled substances are prescribed in excessive dosages and potentially fatal combinations.”

The raids came the day after Gov. Rick Scott reiterated his fervent, ideological opposition to a drug database, designed to prevent oxy shoppers from filling multiple prescriptions, moving from one pill mill to another – circumstances captured nicely by the pain clinics raided Wednesday.

The warrants noted how the pill mills flourish in Florida with minimal regulations, without the tracking system used in most states. “Consequently, individuals have been able to obtain unlimited and unmonitored quantities of controlled substances from multiple pain clinics for either personal consumption or resale in Florida and elsewhere.”

The raids only reinforced the notion, widely held by law enforcement and most of the state’s medical associations, that without a monitoring system, Florida invites criminal operations in the guise of medical clinics.

But after Wednesday, the pill mill industry will be forced to limp along with a dozen fewer doctors.


© 2011 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com


Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/23/v-print/2082013/pill-mill-arrests-hit-right-target.html#ixzz1EqMoYvC7