I used this technique to uncover more than 40 Florida doctors from all over the state with four or more overdose deaths among their patients over two years, and 16 doctors with eight or more deaths. Few of the doctors had any documented training in pain management using narcotics.

An astonishing finding

We added a totally new dimension to this reporting project last spring, after I cornered newly elected state Attorney General Charlie Crist at a newspaper editorial board meeting. I asked him to give us a complete accounting of Medicaid payments for narcotics and other controlled drugs, something the state had never made public before. To my surprise, he readily agreed. The previous attorney general's Medicaid fraud staff had flat out denied my request for the billing data and once it arrived I understood why.

Medicaid spends more than $ 11 billion a year in Florida and the program to treat the poor and disabled has been a source of diversion of prescription drugs, especially narcotics and AIDS/HIV drugs, into the black market for years.

Crist's people sent an Access database containing 8.8 million drug claims for more than $346 million paid by Medicaid to Florida pharmacies in 2000, 2001 and 2002. It had the name and license number of more than 50,000 prescribing doctors, the pharmacies that dispensed them, and the amount paid for each of 844 controlled drugs, from painkillers to tranquilizers.

Doing a query that grouped by drug, dollar amount and prescriber yielded an astonishing finding.

While most doctors ordered these drugs sparingly, a small number wrote enormous amounts. Eight doctors ordered more than $1 million worth of OxyContin for patients in the three-year period, for instance. One, an eye specialist by training, prescribed more than $2.3 million worth, even though he later told me he would never take the drug himself or give it to anybody in his family because of its danger of addiction and overdose.

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paxil - check it

propecia - check it

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