Free Republic

April 17 (UPI) -- In one of the largest federal crackdowns on opioids yet, prosecutors said in an indictment Wednesday investigators uncovered a vast illegal prescription scheme in which physicians traded painkillers for sex and money. The federal indictment involves 350,000 illegal prescriptions in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama and West Virginia. "That is the equivalent of one opioid dose for every man, woman and child in the five states in the region that we've been targeting," Brian Benczkowski, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department, told The Washington Post. "If these medical professionals behave like drug dealers, you can rest...

Hollywood bombshell Anna Nicole Smith's 2007 death in a South Florida hotel room ignited a frenzy of headlines. The four-poster bed she died in at the Hard Rock Hotel. The tub of crushed ice to break her fever. The row of amber pill canisters on the night table. The coroner's verdict: An accidental overdose of some of her nine prescription drugs killed the former Playboy Playmate. Not long after, authorities declared legal narcotics were killing three times as many people as street drugs in Florida. Those events combined to give the Sunshine State an embarrassing new nickname: Pill Mill Capital...

Drug agents raided 11 pain clinics from Miami to West Palm Beach on Wednesday, arresting 23 people and seizing $2.5 million in cash and dozens of cars in the biggest single strike yet at Florida's pain pill industry. Among those arrested were four physicians, including the son of Broward Medical Examiner Joshua Perper, and five owners of raided pain clinics, officials said. The biggest catch, officials said, was Vincent Colangelo, 42, a Davie man who earned an estimated $150,000 a day from the seven now-shuttered pain centers he owned. Law enforcement agencies moved to seize from the Colangelo operation $22...