Florida’s addiction problem – Rick Scott

Several states have implemented prescription drug monitoring programs designed to identify potentially problematic pharmacies, physicians, or patients – those dispensing/prescribing/getting drugs that could cause significant problems.
Florida’s new Governor, the health care expert Rick Scott, thinks Florida shouldn’t have one, and is trying to repeal the law passed last year that got more sunshine into the Sunshine State.
Evidently Scott’s complaints are the cost, privacy, and effectiveness of the program.
These complaints appear to be based on ignorance – at best.
– 34 states already have such programs up and running
– the annual cost runs about a half-million dollars, but all the start up money has already been raised from private donors.
– privacy is guaranteed as the program – already developed – is HIPPA compliant.
So, for a half million dollars, much of it already committed from private funds, the state would be able to help prevent some of the 2500 deaths associated with prescription drugs that occur each year in Florida.
For those inclined to do the math, that’s two hundred bucks per death.
Instead, Florida continues to be a destination spot for out of state tourists seeking drugs, drugs they can’t get in their own states that have implemented prescription drug monitoring programs. This from an article in the EWall Street Journal: “According to Frank Rapier, director of the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, highway patrol officers in hot spots like eastern Tennessee routinely stop vanloads of people returning from Florida with fresh stockpiles of prescription drugs.
In West Virginia, state Sen. Evan Jenkins said flights on discount airlines between Huntington, W. Va., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., have been dubbed the “Oxycontin Express.”
But the problem isn’t just the pills. The devastation wrought by prescription addicts getting pills from Florida is crushing towns far away from Rick Scott’s home state. According to the Sheriff of one small county in Kentucky, “98 percent of the crimes his office works are related to oxycodone and 80 percent of those involve pills from Florida.” The county coroner says two-thirds of his deaths are from pills.
For some of those tourists, the trip is only one way. Drug-seeking people from states as far away as Ohio routinely drive to the Sunshine State to get their fix, occasionally dying on the way home from the meds they’ve scored in Florida.
I stopped doing research on this as the story is so big, the tragedy so wide-spread – and so preventable – that I couldn’t continue.
Scott’s effort to repeal the law is unconscionable.
What does this mean for you?
Elections have consequences.