Dr. Roger Browne was once one of Kentucky's most popular pain doctors.
His office, however, was 850 miles away, in Broward County.
When federal agents raided Browne's Coral Springs clinic, Americare Health and Rehabilitation, last year, they found medical files on nearly 500 Kentucky residents who had received painkillers from the doctor.
Browne was just one part of a vast pill-trafficking industry stretching from Broward County through rural Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and West Virginia.
Squads of traffickers dispatched from those states descend on the Fort Lauderdale area almost daily to buy oxycodone, methadone and other narcotics from doctors at local pain clinics and resell them in Appalachia, according to interviews with police and court records.
Cars from Kentucky loaded with passengers can be seen clogging the parking lots of some Broward clinics. One discount airline flying from West Virginia to Fort Lauderdale is so popular with drug dealers that police have dubbed it the "O.C. Express."
"We're inundated with it. Florida is killing us, " said Sheriff Bill Lewis of Lewis County, Ky., population 14,000. "There's a carload that leaves here so often -- hell, every week or so -- to go to Florida."
In February, Lewis' deputies arrested four people returning to Kentucky with almost 1,000 painkillers prescribed by Florida doctors. And last Thursday, they arrested a suspected oxycodone trafficker carrying the business card of a Hollywood pain doctor in his wallet.
The carloads are lured by Florida's growing number of storefront pain clinics, where doctors can dispense pills to walk-in patients from on-site pharmacies with little oversight -- exploiting lax state laws and health regulations.
Broward County is now the epicenter of a prescription-drug epidemic spreading across the eastern United States, with local doctors dispensing 6.5 million oxycodone pills in the second half of last year -- far outpacing the rest of the country -- according to federal data compiled by the Broward Sheriff's Office.
"Sometimes a doctor with a pen can be some of your biggest drug dealers. It's called legal until you can prove it different, " said Sheriff Kent Harris of Unicoi County, Tenn. Last week, his deputies arrested three men driving back from Florida with 1,000 pills stuffed into the motor of their car.
THE PILL TRAIL
Police in Appalachian states confiscate Florida pills almost daily, prompting the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to ask police in the region to track and log the Florida doctors whose prescriptions they find. The Miami Herald has documented more than a dozen such cases in rural parts of Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Tennessee this year.
The Florida pill pipeline has carved a depressing path through Appalachia, already one of the poorest regions in the country. Kentucky police call painkiller abuse an epidemic -- a far bigger problem than cocaine, methamphetamine or other illegal drugs -- sparking burglaries and robberies, and ruining lives.
"We have families breaking up, and people dying and people losing their jobs, " said Sheriff Keith Cooper of Greenup County, Ky. "It's sad now that it's so routine."
Just as routine are overdose deaths. In West Virginia, accidental overdoses increased by 550 percent from 1999 to 2004 -- the biggest increase in the country -- a spike attributed to prescription painkillers, according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Last August, 38-year-old Timothy Hardin died of an overdose in a Fort Lauderdale hotel room while "doctor-shopping" for pills with three friends from Kentucky, according to a medical examiner's report.
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