The New Drug Crisis: Addiction by Prescription Part 3 of 3

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Florida is lousy with such pain-clinic pill mills, in part because of extremely loose oversight of the people operating them. Until June, when Governor Charlie Crist signed a new law cracking down on the operations, there was nothing to prevent felons from opening a clinic and hiring doctors to write the prescriptions. Indeed, on the […]

The New Drug Crisis: Addiction by Prescription Part 2 of 3

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Health officials do not tease out which drug is responsible for every death, and it’s not always possible. “There may be lots of drugs on board,” says Cathy Barber, director of the Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Is it the opioid that caused the death? Or is it the […]

The New Drug Crisis: Addiction by Prescription Part 1 of 3

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It’s not easy to find a mother who would look back fondly on the time her son had cancer. But Penny (not her real name) does. Penny lives in Boston, and her son got sick when he was just 13. He struggled with the disease for several years — through the battery of tests and […]