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Sunday, Apr. 12, 2009

Ky. sees rise in overdose deaths from pills obtained in Fla.

In tiny Bath County, nine people have died since August from overdoses of powerful pain pills that were prescribed by Florida doctors, including a mother and son who died just five months apart.

"They were all that I had. I tried to watch them as close as I could," said Floyd Chapman, referring to his mother, Barbara Robertson, dead at 53, and his brother, James Chapman, who died at age 35.

Floyd Chapman said he attempted to dissuade the pair from joining thousands of Kentuckians who travel in cars, vans and airplanes to South Florida's pain clinics. Once there, people get monthly prescriptions for hundreds of painkillers like oxycodone. Increasing numbers of Kentuckians are dying as a result.

Drug policy officials in Florida and Kentucky have not tracked the number of overdose deaths along the Interstate 75 pill pipeline. But coroners, physicians and law enforcement officers who are starting to tally the numbers say they are alarmed.

"It's epidemic. I don't know what the answer is. But it's got to stop," said Robert J. Powell, Bath County's coroner.

A combination of factors has led to the much-travelled Kentucky-Florida pipeline. Kentucky and 37 other states electronically monitor the number of narcotics prescriptions a person obtains from physicians. The Sunshine State has no such system. That has led to a proliferation of storefront medical clinics in Florida whose parking lots are filled with cars from Appalachian states and where doctors prescribe and dispense the often-abused drugs for cash.

A Herald-Leader survey of coroners in just three Kentucky counties — Montgomery, Rowan and Floyd — found that 14 people had overdosed on pain pills they obtained from Florida physicians in 2008.

Powell said that, in the past, he investigated about one fatal drug overdose a year in Bath County, where the population is just more than 11,000. Recently, he's seen about one a month.

Van Ingram, director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control, said he is surprised at how quickly the problem has grown.

"I never dreamed that it would be as big as it turned out to be," said Ingram, who said the problem has intensified in the last eight months. "We are hearing of thousands of Kentuckians going to Florida to get prescriptions and ... people going in droves to pharmacies in states along I-75 to get the prescriptions filled."

Death on the road

Not all the deaths connected to the Florida pain-pill phenomenon are overdoses.

In January, a Morehead man and his fiancée were found dead in their car at a Florida rest stop. The cause was carbon monoxide poisoning.

Sgt. Chuck Mulligan, a St. Johns County, Fla., sheriff's spokesman, said he has no evidence that Kenneth Oldham, 23, and Kayla Hinton, 22, had drugs or alcohol in their systems. But in their black Volkswagen Jetta was a bottle of pain pills prescribed by a South Florida physician and filled by a pharmacy there just before they died.

Mulligan said he did not know whom the prescription was for, but the information about the pills has been turned over to police in South Florida.

Denise Hamrick, Oldham's mother, said she did not know her son was in Florida until police came to tell her that he had died.

Hamrick says she hopes Florida passes a law that would require a prescription monitoring system.

"I think all states should pass the laws," Hamrick said.

At least one murder has been linked to the interstate pipeline. Brent Conn of Rowan County died of an overdose in a Florida motel room in 2007 after traveling to Florida in a car with Timothy Riggs of Bath County.

Conn's father, James Kent Conn, blamed Riggs for his son's death. He hunted Riggs down and shot him to death. In September, Conn was sentenced to 45 years to life in prison.

John Riggs, Timothy's father, said his son was addicted to drugs. "Every time I turned around, he was going to Florida," Riggs said.

Now, two families have been damaged irreversibly by the pill pipeline.

"It's ruined my life. It ruined Mr. Conn's life, too," Riggs said. "Everybody's paying, paying for something they are doing in Florida to make the almighty dollar."