Dance of the Reptiles (15 page)

Thirty-eight states use databases to keep track of oxycodone and other painkillers that are now the most widely
abused (and lethal) drugs in the country. Florida is the largest state without such a database, and the undisputed epicenter of the sleazy illegal pill trade.

In the first six months of 2010, doctors in Florida prescribed nine times more oxycodone than was sold in the entire United States during that same period. Pain mills here have prospered wildly and proliferated—in Broward County alone there are 130.

Two years ago, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved a painkiller database, which would be privately funded. Law enforcement officers say it’s an absolutely essential tool for attacking storefront clinics and the drug dealers who flock to Florida from throughout the eastern United States.

The database should have been up and running by now, but bid disputes with private contractors have delayed implementation. Authorities were hoping to have the computerized system in place this spring, but then Scott took office and announced his intention to kill it, along with the state anti-drug office that conceived it.

No one can fathom why.

Top law enforcement officials, legislators, and even the governor of Kentucky (a state that has been saturated tragically with pills from Florida) have asked Scott to reconsider, but he won’t budge.

Last week’s raids, carried out from Miami to West Palm Beach, gave another squalid glimpse of the crisis. The clinics operate as high-volume dispensaries, sometimes with armed guards on patrol. Huge amounts of pills are prescribed by staff doctors to walk-in “patients” exhibiting few, if any, symptoms. Typically the buyers then go peddle the painkillers on the street for up to 10 times the amount they paid.

According to a federal indictment, seven clinics in Broward and Miami-Dade were controlled by a model citizen named Vincent Colangelo, a convicted heroin dealer. Apparently, pharmaceuticals now offer juicier profit margins than smack.

Over a two-year period, Colangelo allegedly distributed more than 660,000 oxycodone pills, enriching him and his partners to the tune of $150,000 a day.

Fortunately, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has its own methods for tracking suspicious prescriptions, and the generous prescribing habits of several doctors attracted the agency’s attention. One of them was Dr. Zvi Perper, who wrote scripts for 387,000 oxycodone tablets in six months at a Delray Beach pain clinic.

Ironically, Zvi Perper is the son of Dr. Joshua Perper, the Broward County medical examiner. Given the sky-high overdose statistics in South Florida, it’s not farfetched to assume that the elder Perper has performed autopsies on some of the younger Perper’s pill-popping customers.

One view of Gov. Scott’s opposition to the drug database is that he’s an ideological extremist who doesn’t like any form of government snooping. Perhaps there are hard feelings left over from his days at Columbia/HCA, when the feds were nailing the company for massive Medicare fraud.

In any case, one can’t help but wonder if Scott’s concern for shielding the privacy of dope dealers will extend to other criminals. Perhaps next he’ll suggest abolishing the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, which maintains a fiendishly thorough computer list of every automobile, truck, and motorcycle registered in the state. Heck, does a police officer really need to know if the car he’s pulling over at 4
A.M.
on I-95 is stolen?

Among the many lawmakers in Tallahassee who are
unhappy with the governor’s vision is Sen. Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey and an energetic supporter of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program.

Fasano has vowed to do everything he can to get the database running and keep it in place, and he’s got enough clout to do it. Senate President Mike Haridopolis says public funding will be used if necessary.

It would be crazy for Scott to veto the measure, but he seems determined to redefine crazy at least once a week.

Last week’s raids on the pill mills provided some insight into whom and what the storefront dope peddlers fear. High on the list are big pharmacy chains, which have no qualms about using computers.

One undercover agent sat in a room full of pill buyers being coached by a clinic nurse on how to get their hefty prescriptions filled without attracting attention.

“Do not go to Walgreens,” the nurse warned. “I can’t say this enough. They are not your friend; they are the enemy.”

Unlike a certain governor.

Note: Gov. Scott backed down, and a database was implemented allowing authorities to track storefront sales of painkillers
.

April 2, 2011

The Best Legislature Money Can Buy

I once referred to a past Legislature as a festival of whores, which in retrospect was a vile insult to the world’s oldest profession.

Today’s lackluster assemblage in Tallahassee is possibly the worst in modern times, and it cannot fairly be compared to anything except a rodeo of phonies and pimps. It’s impossible to remember a governor and lawmakers who were more
virulently anti-consumer and more slavishly submissive to big business.

The list of who’s getting screwed in the state budget battle is long and sadly familiar: the schools, college students, foster children, the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the jobless. The happiest faces, of course, belong to lobbyists for corporations, insurance companies, and utilities, who are getting almost everything they want.

It’s astounding that so many voters were suckered into thinking that this new generation of Republicans was going to fight for the common man instead of for the fat cats and their special interests. What a joke. The so-called leadership was plainly bought and paid for by the time their shoes hit the steps of the Capitol.

The House is swiftly moving to deregulate 20 different types of business, including intrastate movers and telemarketers—two occupations that aren’t exactly famous for being scrupulous and undeceptive. Deregulation is estimated to cost the state about $6 million in revenue (and who knows how much it will cost consumers in rip-offs), but just think of all the terrific new jobs it will create. That’s what supporters claim. Seriously.

Just what Florida needs—more telemarketers!

Bills are also sailing through the House and Senate that will allow Florida Power & Light to raise your electric rates over the next five years while at the same time giving the utility a controlling grip on the state’s future solar energy market.

GOP leaders who otherwise love to cheer free-market capitalism have already voiced support of the monopolistic bill, which gives FPL and four other major utilities exclusive rights to develop solar projects, eliminating pesky bids from smaller firms.

FPL achieved this coup the old-fashioned way, by hiring
30 lobbyists and donating about $4 million in campaign contributions to certain lawmakers and candidates for governor.

Renewable energy would be good for Florida, but competition among providers would actually hold down electric rates. Not happening.

More bad news: If your home is one of 1.3 million insured by Citizens—the state-run pool that was established after Hurricane Andrew—your premiums could soon rise by as much as 25 percent.

A Senate subcommittee last week voted to let Citizens jack up its rates and start dumping policies on homes valued at more than $1 million. The idea is to eventually close down Citizens and shunt all Floridians back into the private insurance market.

That would be a swell idea except for the many thousands of residents who live in coastal areas where private insurance companies will not offer coverage or will provide it only at outlandishly high rates. Citizens is indisputably a mess, but if the Senate bill becomes law, many Floridians could be facing a future hurricane season with no homeowners’ insurance and with their mortgage companies breathing down their necks.

You might be wondering what the new Legislature has accomplished so far for the greater public good. The answer is not much. But to benefit themselves, lawmakers resurrected and decriminalized a scummy little gimmick called “leadership funds,” which allow special-interest groups to give gobs of money to special campaign accounts controlled by the leaders of both political parties, who can spread it around as they see fit.

Outlawed by a long-ago Legislature, leadership funds are simply a sanitized way of buying votes, slightly less sleazy than taking cash in a paper bag.

This time around, donors to the politicians will be listed by name, which is supposed to make us all feel not quite so betrayed.

However, there has been at least one instance this spring when the issue of ethics raised its timid little head in Tallahassee.

Sen. Mike Fasano of New Port Richey introduced a bill that would have toughened penalties for crooked officeholders and public officials. However, the measure was quickly snuffed in the Rules Committee by Fasano’s fellow Republicans and Democrat Gary Siplin of Orlando, who all felt that the current laws are quite stern enough to discourage corrupt behavior. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or vomit.

On a faintly positive note, at least one terrible scheme that took seed in the Legislature will not become law, at least for now.

A few weeks ago, Sen. John Thrasher of St. Augustine and Rep. Pat Rooney of West Palm Beach launched legislation that would have let Jack Nicklaus build golf courses in several state parks, starting with the beautiful Jonathan Dickinson tract near Stuart. No one is a bigger Nicklaus fan than I am, but this truly was one of the nuttiest ideas of all time. Naturally, Gov. Rick Scott loved it.

Florida already has more than 1,000 golf courses, many of them losing business. Meanwhile, our state park system draws 16 million visitors annually and is recognized as one of the country’s finest, a reputation that would disintegrate with the intrusion of driving ranges, fertilized fairways, and golf carts (not to mention hotels, which the bill idiotically allowed).

The outcry was loud and instant, and within days both Rooney and Thrasher bailed. The golf-in-the-parks bill got shelved.

In such dreary political times, it’s good that Floridians can still come together and make themselves heard. The shocker is that they weren’t ignored.

August 6, 2011

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ U.S. Tax Dollars

Earlier this summer, a panel of low-wattage trolls known as the Legislative Budget Commission spurned $2.1 million of a federal grant designed to transition ill and elderly Floridians out of nursing facilities and back to their homes. The program, which started under President George W. Bush, is designed to save states millions in Medicaid costs because residential care for older citizens is less expensive than long-term institutional care. To that end, the feds offered Florida—which has one of the nation’s largest populations of seniors—almost $36 million in phased grants. No thanks, said geniuses like Rep. Rob Schenck of Spring Hill and Rep. Denise Grimsley of Sebring.

Because the Bush program, Money Follows the Person, was renewed as part of the Obama administration’s controversial health-care reform package, most GOP legislators on the panel declined to participate. This astoundingly stupid strategy of sending our U.S. tax dollars to other states is the hatchling of House Speaker Dean Cannon, cheered on by Gov. Rick Scott and other Republican zombies.

The money for moving sick and older residents back home was unnecessary, said Grimsley and Schenck, because state agencies already try to do that. That might come as a surprise to those with relatives in Florida nursing homes.

Even though no state funds were at stake, the members of the Legislative Budget Commission want you to believe that they rejected the $2.1 million seniors grant because of their
staunch frugality. But guess what else they did at the same meeting?

They unanimously voted to hand out a total of $7.5 million to two business firms that were considering expanding operations in Florida or moving here. Here’s the best part: The lawmakers weren’t even given the names of the corporations—one was coded “Project Equis,” the other “Project Christmas.”

I’m totally serious. And these yahoos forked over the money anyway.

This is Florida’s so-called leadership in the year 2011. Screw the sick, poor, and elderly, and grovel worshipfully before any half-assed company with a letterhead and a lobbyist.

To keep their punitive streak going, lawmakers also nixed more than $50 million in federal child-abuse prevention funds (because, gosh, we don’t have a sickening problem with child abuse here, do we?). As before, the money was killed only because it was attached to the administration’s health-care legislation, which many lawmakers say is unconstitutional. Yet the grants being rejected have no relation to the sections of the law being challenged in court.

One casualty of politics is a program in which nurses visit homes where there is a known risk of child abuse or neglect, and counsel young parents. The goal is not only to save lives but also to save the state tons of money. Victims of long-term child abuse often end up in hospitals, foster care, or eventually prison, at a perpetuating cost to Florida taxpayers.

Healthy Families Florida, whose work protecting children at risk has been much praised, would have run the visiting nurses program. After the $50 million from Uncle Sam was rebuffed, nobody in Tallahassee would stand up and take the blame. The House, the Senate, and the governor’s office all
claimed they had nothing to do with sabotaging the grant. It was just one of those mysterious things.

Not so easy to deny was the Legislature’s whacking of $10 million from the Healthy Families state budget, which administrators estimate will cut services to about 6,000 children in 4,000 families.

Lawmakers also squashed a U.S. grant to enlarge two community health centers and build a third in Osceola County. State officials likewise turned their backs on a pilot Medicaid project that would have reimbursed medical providers up to $2 million for hospice services to children who are gravely ill.

Suck it up, kids. You don’t need no stinking U.S. tax dollars.