Title: How Florida Ignited the Heroin Epidemic

URL: https://heroin.palmbeachpost.com/

Collection: Drug Industry Web Archive

Description: Three part series on the beginnings of the opioid crisis and how it led to the heroin crisis: Purdue Pharma and El Chapo had provided kindling: The pharma company’s unprecedented marketing campaign for its blockbuster OxyContin painkiller did not stop with pill sales. Purdue marketing helped ensure that for the first time in U.S. history, heavy doses of one of the most addictive substances known to man would be prescribed by family doctors for everything from sprained ankles to migraines. Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, long focused on marijuana and transporting South American cocaine, took note of America’s new-found appetite for narcotics and began seeding mountainsides with poppy plants, the source of heroin. But it took Florida to set the heroin epidemic ablaze, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found. For years, Florida’s repeated failure to rein in its homegrown prescription painkiller scourge nourished a bumper crop of opioid addicts and dealers. It was widely reported that rogue clinics in Palm Beach and Broward counties funneled OxyContin and fueled addiction in Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and West Virginia. It was much worse. DEA reports and federal court records show that by 2010, Florida was the reliable opioid dealer of choice to users and dealers in not only the Southeast, but also in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes regions — an area spanning virtually every state east of the Mississippi River. And when Florida finally turned off the free-flowing oxycodone spigot in 2011, drug users in states once fed by Florida oxycodone did exactly what users in Palm Beach County and Florida did: They turned to heroin.

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Subject:   opioids,  pill mill,  heroin,  OxyContin,  Purdue Pharma,  El Chapo,  Florida ,  addiction