Fl. Drug Czar on Elimination of Office & Effect on Pill Mills
We've been following the years-long effort to create a prescription drug monitoring program in Florida because it has a major impact on Broward County.
The bill took 7 years to pass the state legislature, before being enacted earlier this year.
But now — according to outgoing Director Bruce Grant — the effort to create the monitoring program and the Florida Office of Drug Control itself have been dealt a "setback" by Governor-elect Rick Scott.
Grant and his three full-time employees got word yesterday that they would no longer have jobs starting January 3 and the office is being eliminated.
I asked Grant where that leaves the effort to create a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program — which will track each prescription written in Florida in hopes of reducing the amount of criminal doctor shopping statewide.
"I don't know what happens to the effort and in my opinion it loses steam," Grant told me.
This is especially important to Broward County, known as the pill mill capital of the country. As we've reported often on CBS 4, people travel to Florida — and many to Broward County — to visit a series of doctors in hopes of returning to their home states with fistfuls of prescription pills they can sell on the black market for large amounts of money.
The new program will allow doctors to see when a patient received a prescription and what ailment it was for. It will enable doctors to ensure each patient is receiving a prescription for a legitimate ailment and control the amount of prescriptions a patient is getting.
Broward County has seen a meteoric rise in the number of pill mills in the county — they have more than doubled from 2008 to 2009. Several cities placed moratoriums on new pills mills being created in their communities to cut down on criminal activity.
The state legislature approved the program earlier this year but did not fund it. Instead, Grant told me, his office secured $800,000 in federal grants and $500,000 in private donations to pay for it. He believes those funds will keep the programming running until next June.
To read more about the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program,
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According to published reports, Governor-elect Scott plans to move the drug control effort to the Departments of Health and Law Enforcement.
Grant questions that decision.
"The Department of Health does not see this as a core mission," he told me.
Grant said his office costs the state about $551,000 per year. He said he reached out to Scott's transition team on several occasions before the announcement to eliminate the Office of Drug Control and never received a response.
