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Cargando... American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemicpor John Temple
   Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  crazybatcow | Sep 12, 2016 |    ) rivkat | Aug 19, 2016 | sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Premios
History.
True Crime.
Nonfiction.
HTML:* Finalist for the Edgar® Award in Best Fact Crime * New York Post, "The Post's Favorite Books of 2015" * Suspense Magazine's "Best True Crime Books of 2015" * Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of the Year in True Crime * Publishers Weekly, Big Indie Book of Fall 2015 The king of the Florida pill mills was American Pain, a mega-clinic expressly created to serve addicts posing as patients. From a fortress-like former bank building, American Pain's doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts who came by the vanload. Inked muscle-heads ran the clinic's security. Former strippers operated the pharmacy, counting out pills and stashing cash in garbage bags. Under their lab coats, the doctors carried gunsâ??and it was all legal... sort of. American Pain was the brainchild of Chris George, a 27-year-old convicted drug felon. The son of a South Florida home builder, Chris George grew up in ultra-rich Wellington, where Bill Gates, Springsteen, and Madonna kept houses. Thick-necked from weightlifting, he and his twin brother hung out with mobsters, invested in strip clubs, brawled with cops, and grinned for their mug shots. After the housing market stalled, a local doctor clued in the brothers to the burgeoning underground market for lightly regulated prescription painkillers. In Florida, pain clinics could dispense the meds, and no one tracked the patients. Seizing the opportunity, Chris George teamed up with the doctor, and word got out. Just two years later Chris had raked in $40 million, and 90 percent of the pills his doctors prescribed flowed north to feed the rest of the country's insatiable narcotics addiction. Meanwhile, hundreds more pain clinics in the mold of American Pain had popped up in the Sunshine State, creating a gigantic new drug industry. American Pain chronicles the rise and fall of this game-changing pill mill, and how it helped tip the nation into its current opioid crisis, the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. The narrative swings back and forth between Florida and Kentucky, and is populated by a gaudy and diverse cast of characters. This includes the incongruous band of wealthy bad boys, thugs and esteemed physicians who built American Pain, as well as penniless Kentucky clans who transformed themselves into painkiller trafficking rings. It includes addicts whose lives were devastated by American Pain's drugs, and the federal agents and grieving mothers who labored for years to bring the clinic's crew to jus No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)362.29Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Social problems of & services to groups of people Mentally ill Substance abuseClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.82)
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6
The second thing of note is that the 'vignette' stories chosen to demonstrate just how bad this Oxy issue is were a bit scattered, or perhaps the better word is thin... the author spent 80% of the book looking at the main characters and their drug marketing process but the 20% which looked at (real) people's issues with the drug, or the company, seemed randomly inserted. Sure, they were interesting, but the flow was not really logical - we read 4 chapters about the business, then a vignette chapter about an addict dying from a drug overdose, then 2 chapters of business, then a chapter with another set of characters drug addiction, etc. There didn't seem to be a pattern, unless it was meant to be a time-scale thing, but that was not clear.
I did, however, Google this organization when I finished the book and it seems the story was based on real characters, and real addicts so perhaps the weird addition of certain addicts' details was because those one were the ones whose information was public due to lawsuits, or whatever... and the rest of the addicts' story were just a conglomeration of stories blended together.
Anyway, all that being said, I couldn't put the book down. I don't understand how they were allowed to run this business this way, and/or why they had to go so far with it that they got arrested... because until some (unclear) tipping point, what they were doing was legal (which is sad in and of itself). Though I suppose once you start making so much money each day that you have to put it into garbage cans, you might realize you probably crossed a line somewhere. (