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FLORIDA DRUG CZAR PLEDGES CRACKDOWN ON PAINKILLER ABUSE

Calling Florida's rising death toll from prescription drug abuse "mass murder," the state's drug czar on Wednesday vowed to crack down on pain clinics and doctors who supply too many pills to addicts.

"We want to make an example out of those doctors who are violating the Hippocratic Oath and the law," said James McDonough, director of the Office of Drug Control. "Any professional who does that will suffer the consequences."

State agents earlier this week charged Dr. Sarfraz A. Mirza, a Melbourne pain specialist, with 11 counts of trafficking in the controversial painkiller OxyContin. McDonough said more doctors are under investigation and will face arrest if found to have violated medical standards.

McDonough appeared before a group of about 200 community leaders and dignitaries, including the state's first lady Columba Bush, at Nova Southeastern University in Davie for a town meeting to discuss how to stem death toll from prescription drugs.

During the meeting, doctors and pain management clinics found themselves under attack not only from the drug czar, but also from angry families of overdose victims and the director of Broward's addiction care program.

"This disease has taken the most prized possession of Broward County," said Dr. Scott Howell, director of the Broward County Substance Abuse and Health Care Division, addressing blown-up photographs of six young people who died from pill overdoses.

Howell also took aim at doctors and pain care centers that don't adequately screen out people who are searching for a steady supplying of drugs to get high.

"Prescribing medication for the sole purpose to support addiction in the guise of pain management is unscrupulous and immoral practice of medicine," he said.

Deaths from abuse of prescription medicines have soared across Florida in recent years, far surpassing illegal street drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Last year, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel investigation traced almost 400 deaths to pill overdoses in seven counties from Miami- Dade to Okeechobee during 2000 and 2001.

State officials have been alarmed in recent years by the explosive growth of pain management clinics, some staffed by doctors with little or no training in the specialty, that routinely order up heavy doses of narcotics for their patients. Under state law, anyone can open a pain clinic if they hire a licensed physician to serve as medical director. Florida law also allows doctors who register as "dispensing practitioners" to sell prescription narcotics directly from their offices.

But Dr. Pamela Sutton, director of palliative care for the North Broward Hospital District, told the audience that an estimated 48 million Americans take medication daily for pain, and consider the pills a godsend. "These medicines save the lives of millions of people when they are done correctly," she said.

Maureen Flori, whose son Drew Parkinson died from an overdose at age 25, presented the flip side. She held up bags filled with more than 1,000 multicolored pieces of candy to symbolize the number of narcotic pills a doctor prescribed for her son less than two months before he died last year.

Medical examiner records show that the Miami doctor prescribed 1,455 pills in 57 days for Parkinson, including potent narcotics methadone, Dilaudid and sedatives Xanax and Soma, after he claimed to be suffering from back pain. No tests were performed to confirm the diagnosis, Flori said.

Parkinson was one of six patients of Dr. Jerome Waters who died of drug overdoses in the past two years, records show.

Waters is one of four South Florida doctors in recent months who state health officials have barred from prescribing controlled drugs. All of the doctors were linked to patient overdoses through a Sun-Sentinel review of medical examiner and police records. The doctors face state hearings before the state's medical boards, which could result in further discipline up to revocation of their licenses to practice.

McDonough said doctors, pharmacists and law enforcement authorities would be able to identify drug addicts and their suppliers if the Florida Legislature would agree to set up a statewide database to tracking millions of prescriptions filled by Florida pharmacists every year. The monitoring system would be capable of retrieving a patient's drug history while the patient is still in the examining room, or waiting at the pharmacy.

The goal of the computerized system, McDonough said, would be to cut down on so-called "doctor shopping," in which patients visit several physicians to obtain drugs, either to feed their addiction or to sell on the street.

A bill that would have created an electronic prescription data bank in Florida has been debated for more than three years in the Legislature, but failed to pass.