About this item
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 guns - 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 justice.
About the Author
John Temple teaches journalism at West Virginia University in Morgantown, where he lives with his wife and two sons.
John takes regular breaks from that life to spend time in special worlds, including autopsy rooms and prisons and Florida. He takes pictures and records audio, if they let him. Then he comes back home and tries to make a story out of what he's seen or heard about.
He's written three narrative journalism books, including the forthcoming American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Crew of Doctors Unleashed the Deadliest Drug Epidemic in U.S. History (September 2015) .
Temple also wrote Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office, published in 2005, and The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates, winner of the 2010 Scribes Book Award.
He also writes novels and screenplays and hopes to sell one soon.
For a proper biography, see John's WVU bio at http://reedcollegeofmedia.wvu.edu/faculty_staff/faculty/john_temple.
Also check out his website at www.johntemplebooks.com.
