Quotes from John Temple

Needle marks scarred her hands, the only place on her body she could still find a vessel. She was dissolving and injecting ten to twenty pills a day. The highs weren't really highs anymore, just a break from the bone-deep pain of withdrawal.

That's oxycodone—one of the most irresistible opioid narcotics ever cooked up in the six-thousand-year history of dope.

But since the mid-1990s, pharmaceutical giants have aggressively marketed painkillers to a wider group of patients with long-term or milder forms of pain. At the same time, the federal government has approved one massive increase after another in the quantities manufactured, even as its own officials declared prescription drug abuse a mounting epidemic.

More and more of the pills were diverted to the black market and by the eve of 2010, more people were addicted to or abusing narcotic painkillers than any illegal drug except marijuana. Far more. The number of people who regularly used prescription drugs to get high in 2009 was more than four and a half times higher than the number of people who regularly used cocaine.

the clinic was inhaling $100,000 a day. A day.

he learned to exploit three loopholes in Florida law and regulations. The first was the state's lack of a prescription database. Pill seekers and their doctors found it easy to operate in Florida because cops and pharmacists had no way to track the flow of prescription narcotics.

The second loophole: Florida didn't license pain clinics or their owners. The state issued licenses to electrolysis clinics, massage establishments, and optician offices, but anybody who could register a business with the Florida Secretary of State office could own a pain clinic, meaning, basically, anybody.

The third loophole that led to the oxycodone rush was that Florida law allowed doctors to sell narcotics themselves, no pharmacist needed. Pain clinics that charged for appointments and drugs could make a lot of money, and the one-stop shopping concept lured drug-seeking patients who didn't want to pay for prescriptions that might be hard to get filled.

By the height of the state's pill mill rush, Florida doctors were purchasing nine times more oxycodone than doctors in other states. That's nine times more than the other forty-nine states combined. In one six-month period, according to DEA records, Florida doctors bought 41.2 million doses while every other physician in the country collectively purchased 4.8 million doses.

Ohio was the second-ranked state in this category of physician purchasers. Its doctors bought about a million doses of oxycodone in 2009. The same year, through his doctors, Chris George bought more than twice as much oxy as every single doctor in Ohio. Four of American Pain's full-time doctors ranked among the top nine physician purchasers of oxycodone in the country.

A new clinic was opening every three days, on average,

As the flow of patients and cash had continued to rise, Ethan was spending up to six hours each night counting the money.