Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) officials said Monday, major in-roads are being made in the war on prescription drugs since the statewide Drug Enforcement Strike Force was launched in March.
The Strike Force, led by chiefs and sheriffs from across the state has made 937 arrests, including 17 doctors, and seized 252,000 pharmaceutical pills, 34 vehicles, 47 weapons and seized over $1.7 million in cash.
Gov. Rick Scott, FDLE Commissioner Gerald Bailey and State Surgeon General Dr. Frank Farmer, were in South Florida, the epic center of Florida’s prescription drug battlefield, to provide an update on Florida’s fight against prescription drug abuse and to make public the statistics from last year’s autopsy deaths, which highlight the need to continue the fight.
New statistics from the DEA show a 17 percent drop in oxycodone purchased by Florida’s pharmacies and practitioners for the first five months of 2011, compared to a similar period last year. Between January and May of last year, pharmacies purchased 236 million doses of oxycodone and practitioners purchased 35 million doses; for the same period this year, oxycodone purchased by pharmacies dropped to 225 million and the quantity purchased by practitioners plummeted to just 925,000 doses.
Today the Strike Force began destroying the more than 357,000 pills voluntarily surrendered by physicians and quarantined by law enforcement as a result of the passage of House Bill 7095. The legislation declared a public health emergency and imposed new restrictions for dispensing selected controlled substances. The Florida Department of Health (DOH) issued 157 emergency suspension orders since the end of March, of which 49 percent involved the illegal dispensing, prescribing or use of prescription drugs.
The 2010 Florida Medical Examiners Commission Report on Drugs Identified in Deceased Persons, was also released today. The report shows that prescription drugs continued to be found more often than illicit drugs, both as the cause of death and as present in the deceased. In 2010, 5,647 people died with one or more prescription drugs in their system. Of those cases, prescription drugs were the cause of death for 2,710 individuals, an 8.9 percent increase over 2009.
The report indicates the drugs that caused the most deaths were oxycodone (1,516), benzodiazepines (1,304 – with alprazolam, also known as Xanax, accounting for 981 deaths), methadone (694), ethyl alcohol (572) and cocaine (561). Oxycodone occurrences increased by 22.4 percent in 2010 and deaths caused by oxycodone rose by 27.9 percent when compared to the previous year.
“The severity of this epidemic cannot be overstated,” said Dr. Farmer. “DOH is committed to suspending and revoking the licenses of unscrupulous practitioners who inappropriately prescribe highly addictive controlled substances to patients, with the hopes of stopping countless senseless deaths in our state.”
