With the best of intentions and the worst of plans, Florida’s long-delayed 2011 crackdown on pill mills ignited the heroin crisis, not just in Florida, but across more than half the country, a Palm Beach Post investigation found. When Florida finally turned off the free-flowing oxycodone spigot, drug users in states once fed by Florida oxycodone did exactly what users in Palm Beach County and Florida did: They turned to heroin. To backtrack the origins of the heroin crisis, The Post layered different data sets atop one another, combing through federal, state and local death, treatment and hospital records spanning 50 states and 15 years. Reporters drove the “Oxy Express” highways from Palm Beach County to Appalachia, the route users and dealers once traveled to load up on tens of thousands of oxycodone pills at a clip. They unearthed decades-old documents and sought out emergency room doctors and former addicts, small-town mayors and cops, mothers of overdose victims, epidemiologists and forensic experts. The aftershocks could be felt in Huntington, W.Va., where police crime analysts found the crisis pivoted on a single day: A prescription drug epidemic before June 3, 2011, the day Gov. Rick Scott signed off on Florida crackdown laws, and a heroin epidemic immediately after. It was felt in Greenup County, Ky., where, when the flood of Florida oxycodone slowed to a trickle, Detroit gangs selling heroin moved in. In Huntington,’I can remember the day that we stopped seeing them,’ said oxycodone addict-turned-drug counselor Will Lockwood of the once-steady flow of Florida pills. ‘And the very next day, heroin showed up.’
