Last year the radio show was the first to display the dramatic phoniness of last year's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program passed in last year's legislature (6/21 Blog).  It appears the Republican led legislature has decided to attempt to fool the people again.  The revisiting of the Drug Monitoring Bill has created another future embarrassment and continued fiasco within our state.  It appears the Florida Medical and Osteopathic Associations run our state government and not our elected officials.

The recent passage of the real time reporting for cold tablet sales to prevent methamphetamine manufacturing was very positive.  However, the legislation of selling cold tablets was not duplicated in the present Drug Monitoring Bill.  The pharmacy must report the selling of a cold tablet immediately (real time reporting) but the pharmacies have fifteen days to report a sale of over 500 narcotic tablets.  There is no reporting of doctor office visits for the Drug Monitoring Bill.   An individual during their one day tourist visit to Florida can still visit five doctors in the same day and not be detected.  There is nothing in the bill that will prevent a twenty year kid from obtaining OxyContin from one of the almost 1000 legally sanctioned drug dealers (pain management doctors) in our state.

There was much fanfare from the legislators that the drug dealing clinics would be limited to not being able to sell drugs for cash any longer.  However, that does not prevent the deal to go down at the pharmacy next door.  

As for moving the felons out of the business, everyone has a sister or cousin with no criminal record to open up a clinic.  The record keeping the clinics are now required to create will be a bit of an inconvenience, but an additional $50 cash will alleviate the extra paper work.

The Florida Legislature proved who runs Florida.  As the drugs continue to flow on our streets, it will be harder to convince business and industry that Florida is a nice place to work.  Maybe the Florida Medical and Osteopathic Associations are creating and saving jobs for our children.