AMERICAN PAIN Read Online Free PDF Page B

had explained that insurance companies would cause problems for pain clinics if they felt they were paying for unnecessary prescriptions. Taking insured patients wasn’t worth the scrutiny. Dianna took the $200 they charged for new patient visits, and the patient filled out the paperwork Chris and Derik had lifted from the other clinic. When it was the patient’s turn to see Overstreet, Dianna hit a switch that unbolted the magnetic lock on the door between the waiting room and the exam rooms. The patient went back to the exam room, came out five or ten minutes later with a prescription in hand, usually 240 oxycodone 30 milligrams, 60 to 120 oxycodone 15 milligrams, and 60 alprazolam. Chris hadn’t known how to order prescription pads, so he had called a print shop in West Palm Beach and given them Overstreet’s name, address, phone, and license number, and they’d printed them up, using some kind of special prescription paper.
    So the patient would give the scrip to Dianna, and she would go back to the “dispensary,” a big name for the nine-by-three-and-a-half-foot closet where they kept the drugs in a gun safe they’d picked up at Costco and bolted to the floor. A laptop connected to a label printer sat on a card table. They’d copied the label format from a legit pill bottle to make sure they had all the right information on there. She’d punch in the patient’s information, print a label, fix it to a pill bottle, pull the drugs from the safe, and fill the bottle. Back at the front desk, she’d take the money for the meds, usually between $400 and $700, hand over the bottle, staple the receipt to the patient’s paperwork, and file it. Done.
    Chris had Googled a few policies; the rest he either made up as he went along or he asked Overstreet. The doctor didn’t seem worried that anybody would be checking up on them.
    On the first day of business, Dr. Overstreet had brought a bunch of small bags filled with pills from his house—oxycodone, Xanax, and Valium. He’d ordered the pills when he was still working at the One Stop Medical clinic and took them when he left. The bags weren’t labeled, and Overstreet didn’t even seem entirely sure exactly what was inside them. Five patients showed up on Day One, and Dianna counted their pills out of the bags and put them in pill bottles.
    Everyone got pills, or, if the dispensary was bare, they got a prescription. Overstreet never turned anyone away empty-handed. His only restriction seemed to be that he wouldn’t prescribe more than 240 oxyco-done 30-milligram pills per patient every twenty-eight days. More than 240 pills, he told Chris, and you’re likely to attract police or DEA attention. Better to stay under the radar. He didn’t say how he knew this.
    Derik figured it couldn’t be kosher for Dianna—whose previous work experience consisted primarily of dancing at Emerald City Gentleman’s Club—to be operating the drug dispensary. He asked Chris about it. Didn’t you have to be a pharmacist to hand out pills? Especially these pills? Chris said he’d asked Overstreet the same thing, and the doctor said it was OK because Dianna was under his supervision. Chris had looked up the rules, and as far as he could tell Overstreet was right. Lucky for them, Florida law allowed doctors not only to write prescriptions but also to actually sell the controlled substances themselves. No pharmacist needed.
    In fact, a major key to the pain clinic business, Overstreet had told Chris, was dispensing the drugs in-house. That way, patients didn’t have to find a pharmacy to fill their prescriptions, which wasn’t always easy. Legitimate pharmacies sometimes blacklisted a pain clinic, refused to fill its scrips. They didn’t like to see too many suspicious-looking patients with large narcotics prescriptions from the same place. They’d grill the patient, call the clinic. Patients hated this. If South Florida Pain Clinic wrote and filled the prescriptions, patients