American pain
The king of the pill mills was American Pain, a mega-clinic that served as a prototype for the rest. From a pristine former bank building, doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts who came by the vanload. Inked muscle-heads ran security, greeting the morning rush of pill poppers with cries of Welcome to the dope hole! Strippers and high-priced hookers operated the pharmacy, counting out pills and stashing cash in garbage bags.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2018–2024years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A few years ago, I talked to three retired federal law enforcement agents who had each spent 20+ years fighting the cartels that were bringing drugs into the US from Mexico and South America. All three felt betrayed by the US government. They said, essentially, "We put our lives on the line many times to try to stop the flow of drugs. Then the government turned around and basically gave the pharmaceuticals license to sell this stuff professionally, through people's personal physicians."
These retired agents didn't see the drug war as a war on "bad guys," but as an effort to stop the destruction drugs wrought in people's lives. After all their work, their own government undermined their efforts.
My own doctor was taken in by Big Pharma's sales pitch and wound up going to prison for over-prescribing their pills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hurwitz. Though to hear Big Pharma tell it, there was no such thing as over-prescribing.
If you want to get an idea of how out-of-hand the prescription frenzy got, take a look at John Temple's book American Pain, which describes the pill mills in South Florida. Towns in Appalachia used to send charter buses to these pharmacies. After a 12-20 hour bus ride, each passenger would pick up hundreds or thousands of pills, then ride home to sell them in their small country towns.
Some of the pill mills, which were fully licensed by the state of Florida, were cash-only and would haul garbage bags full of money to the bank each day at closing. For a summary of Temple's book, see https://adiamond.me/2020/01/american-pain-by-john-temple/
- I have no life outside of reading and consume nearly 200 books/year, so I'd love to offer up a few 2018 favorites!
Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire (by Marc Bowden).
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (Ryan Holiday).
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Sam Quinones).
American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic (John Temple).
Rosemary's Baby (Ira Levin).
The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922 (Edmond Taylor).
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (Jeffrey Toobin).
The Way of Kings: The Stormlight Archive, Book 1 (Brandon Sanderson). This year was my fourth read. Don't get me started :/
