You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Walking into a Pill Mill.
What’s a pill mill? It’s a clinic where a dirty doctor over prescribes narcotics in vast, unimaginable quantities. They give these pills to doctor shoppers who have oozed up from a dirt hole, lieing, cheating, doing anything to obtain a fix.
Narcotic abuse is one of the biggest problems in Tennessee and it goes on around us each and every day.
Why should you care? because these are our loved ones, our neighbors, our friends. Why should we care, because people break into your house to steal your plasma to get money for pills. Why should you care? Because people high on dilaudid and Oxycontin drive into other people and cause tragedy.
It’s a vicious merry go round of addiction that has to stop. Someone needs to shine the light in the corner and make the cock roaches scurry.
Today that’s my job, my task. I’m shaking I’m so excited to inhale this problem.
My face is on TV every day. I’m the kid on the milk carton in market #29. Me walking into a pill clinic pretending to be a narcotic fiend is going to be as successful as a late night tv abdominal machine reducing flab.
So today my cameraman, my friend, my ally, Al Devine, volunteers for the assignment.
Al is pushing 60 and has a bad knee that needs replacing. For Al, going into a pill clinic to get some relief probably isn’t too far out of the question. But on this day, he is working with me and he plays the role well.
He is dressed in saggy jeans and a loose shirt. He has no tattoos which might be a red flag on this assignment where every doctor shopper is sporting enough body ink to make a NASCAR team envious.
I hear that this doctor is dirty like a Mexican Federale. But we still need to go in there with a little documentation to sell our story of a chronic injury from a fall in a galaxy a long long time ago.
You see it’s all make believe. It doesn’t matter if the story is true. The only thing that matters is that the money is real, the high necessary. It all starts with a doctor visit. It’s an ugly little cycle where pills and green backs pass hands like candy on Halloween.
To start this undercover farce, we Google XRAYS in the station art department. The Internet is a waitress serving me a cocktail of broken bones to choose from. Knees and joints and elbows. Blue and white and yellow. The variety of universal maladies there for the taking is astounding.
With an 8 X 10 glossy of some anonymous broken bone, we head off to the South Nashville pill mill.
The building is unlike any clinic you have been to. It’s a part of a trucking company. There is no signage that says medical offices or pain clinic. It is a brick building where people come and go by the dozens. It might as well be a meat packing plant or a cardboard processing center.
A week earlier I surveilled this parking lot with a member of the Drug Task Force. He pointed out the people meandering in the parking lot.
“they’re networking” he will tell me. “They are talking about who writes scripts and which pharmacies will provide pills.”
It’s a cesspool of addicts and ne’er do wells smoking cigarettes and scratching their itchy skin.
I pull up to the front of the facility. It feels dirty and raw.
I put a camera in Al’s pocket and he exits the car.
I drive away looking at him wobble up the stairs. Al makes a good drug fiend, I think to myself.
I park on a hill overlooking the clinic.
I watch patients come and go. Everyone coming out of the facility is holding a piece of paper as they head to cars with out of county license plates.
Al is inside about 10 minutes, then he emerges.
“That’s way too quick,” I mutter to myself.
My phone rings.
“Come get me.”
I drive around the side and pick him up.
He climbs in.
“How’d it go?”
“It’s sketchy as hell,” He says.
“Did they give you an appointment?” I ask.
“Early June,” he says.
“Damn. That’s a long time to wait.”
Al shows me his footage. It’s visual A.D.D. bouncing from one thing to the next.
I see his feet and the floor and then a portion of a chair and a wall. There’s the ceiling and light and finally the receptionist.
“I’m having a seizure,” I say aloud.
“I gotta adjust the pen camera next time,” he says.
I watch as Al asks the receptionist for an appointment.
Even though she is sitting behind the counter, just one foot away, the woman says Al has to call the clinic on his phone to make an appointment.
“Wait a minute. You are standing at the receptionist window talking to a receptionist who tells you to call the clinic where you are standing and talk to another person in the same office to make an appointment at the clinic?”
“Sketchy huh?”
“Damn straight.”
I watch as Al Calls the clinic and a woman inside the office, not far from the window where he is standing, picks up.
She asks him his name and his address.
I hear Al says he has an x ray.
Then the third question.
“Oh $300 dollars?” he questions. “OK, $300”
I laugh out loud. 300 dollars for what? Name. Address. Three hundred dollars? It is borderline criminal what is happening.
Al exits the spartan like waiting room. He stops to talk to a woman resting under a shade tree.
“How long did it take you to get an appointment?”
“A week,” she says.
“Where are you going to fill your prescription?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she replies. “I live in Murfreesboro.” Her words trail off. “I don’t know where I’m going to go.”
It’s all a big comical red flag. Here is a Murfreesboro woman in need of pain meds at a Nashville Pill Mill.
Murfreesboro is 40 minutes from this shade tree. What is she doing here? Isn’t there a pill mill where she lives? She is holding a prescription for rocket fuel in a capsule. She needs her fix, she needs to deaden the pain of life, the pain of pain, the pain of existence. And here she is sitting on a muddy hillside next to a generic brick building lamenting that she cannot get narcotics because few if any reputable pharmacies will fill a prescription from this doctor.
Why? Because he is pill pushing scum.
I can’t say his name, because he is not charged with anything. In fact the state dept of health tells me that they have no red flags for this physician. The state department of health also tells me that they have a listing for this pain clinic. The state says it has no idea where he is or what he is doing. It pisses me off.
The doctor is a demon peddling flesh and pills at 300 dollars a pop. His waiting room is full and he is cranking out 10,000 dollars a day.
The lure of easy money, it has a very strong appeal.
In the pharmaceutical world, this doctor’s name is well known. It’s a boil that pharmacists want to lance.
I’m saddened by this place. It’s a tragic treadmill of insidiousness. I feel like I’m staring into a sweaty arm pit of humanity. There is a look of desperation here, a feeling of hopelessness.
“Lets get out of here and regroup,” I say.
I drive away. Immediately the air is cleaner, the sky bluer, the possibilities of the day brighter.
We get back to the station and ask the boss if he wants us to wait till June to keep the appointment. He says yes, but check with the attorney.
That’s a good idea.
The station attorney and I have a love hate relationship. He’s like an ex wife who you still pay alimony to.
“It’s NOT ILLEGAL to go into the waiting room and ask for an appointment,” he says. “But it would be illegal to try and obtain a prescription from the doctor under false pretenses,” he admonishes.
Got it.
So that part of the story is dead. No fake exrays. No pills.
So let’s air the other stuff, I say. The hinky receptionist. The crazies in the parking lot clinging to scripts they cannot fill.
It’s a world few of us see. It’s a world we need to show. If we don’t see the enemy, how can we possibly defeat him.
to be continued.
Life’s Crazy™