This week the FDLE made a great bust, on a doctor and the owner of one of our many pain clinics here in Florida. However the bust wasn’t for drug possession, or drug trafficking, it was for engaging in sexual activity with a juvenile and providing her with prescription pain pills in exchange for sex. This doctor operates about 12 miles from my office. I am certain that I have counseled with some of his patents in the past five years. I am sure there are some that I didn’t have a chance to counsel with because they overdosed and died while in this doctor’s care. Just about every week I get calls from grieving parents who have lost a son or daughter from pain pill overdoses. Or they are crying out for help before their child does overdose and die. Pain pills are very easy to overdose on, easier than alcohol and other street drugs. They simply pass out; and then stop breathing. Within a few minutes their body’s organs begin the process of shutting down, then they begin to turn blue, and in ten or fifteen minutes they are gone.

 When the police started investigating this doctor’s pain clinic they were shocked to find out that this one doctor has prescribed more than a quarter of a million Oxycodone pain pills in just the past 8 months. To put this in perspective consider this: The doctors in all of California prescribed 300,000 pills in the last six months of 2010. Here is a quote from the newspaper on this recent bust:

 "When we've got a doctor who has written prescriptions for over a quarter-million pills, when we’re comparing his sole numbers to an entire state like California, that is big," said Danny Banks, an FDLE agent who investigated the case. "This is one of our worst offenders in Central Florida and probably the state."

            I am happy to say that this doctor is not only behind bars; he is out of business, and his medical license has been suspended. It is a good thing that he is out of commission; however the bad news is that there are already other doctors bucking to sell pain pills to his former patients. When are people going to wake up and see what these pill mills are doing to us as a nation? Let me give you a personal illustration. A few months ago I had some minor surgery, so minor in fact that I went home a few hours after it was over. The doctor gave me a script for 60 Oxycodone pills. I tried to reason with the doctor that I didn’t need nearly that many pain pills but he refused to change the script. I bought the 60 pills, used three of them and threw the rest away. It is painfully obvious to me how someone can become dependant on these pills when they are prescribed ten times the amount needed for a minor procedure.

 The rest of the story is this: If they only need them for two days but use them for 30 days, they will most likely become drug sick when they run out. They will feel lousy, like getting a bad case of the flu. They might have diarrhea or start feeling nauseous for a few days. For many people when they start going through the withdrawals they run back to the doctor for another script, there starts the downfall! When their doctor eventually cuts them off, they can easily buy them on the street. They sell for anywhere from 2 to 5 dollars each all day every day. No wonder our young people are finding themselves chasing this drug as they dig their own grave into addiction. In the past few weeks I have seen several young people between 18 and 20 years of age who were addicted and shooting the drug like a hard core heroin addict. Looking at the needle tracks on their arms and hands brings back a flood of memories of my own drug addiction almost four decades ago. The difference between my use in the late sixties and early seventies and these young people is that they can get clean needles all day for free and the drug they shoot up has the same consistency because it is manufactured in a lab. I use to find my needles in garbage containers and sharpen the point with a book of matches and the drugs I shot up were never the same consistency depending on what they were cut with and the country they originated from. That is why I shutter when I think of the crazy things I did in my early drug days. It is a miracle that I am alive, and that I never contracted Hepatitis B or C or worse yet HIV. The fact that I am alive and relatively healthy means I must have worn out a legion of angels along the way.

Please continue to pray for the many young people who are out there hooked on this synthetic heroin sold legally as a remedy for whatever ache or pain that ails you.

Lew Gervais

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