No wonder they need my cigarette tax money

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in an affidavit filed in support of search warrants, gave the public an insight this week into the role government programs can play in prescription drug abuse.

The taxpayer is the supplier.

Special Agent M.A. Withrow, an investigator with the department and a former investigator with the state Medicaid program, contended in the affidavit, among other things:

- that Justice Medical Complex in Stonecoal, ………..

- that Justice Medical steers its prescriptions to two Sav-Rite pharmacies ….....

- that Dr. John Theodore Tiano, a resident at Marshall University, was paid more than $250,000 .......

- that undercover agents and informants posing as patients .........

- that Abad's role "is ...........

- that business was so brisk in 2006 that the Kermit pharmacy dispensed almost 3.2 million hydrocodone pills - more than any other pharmacy in West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia. The national average is 97,431 pills.

- that James P. Wooley, who owns both pharmacies, when deposed in a civil lawsuit, said the Kermit Sav-Rite had gross sales of $6.5 million in 2006 and filled prescriptions at the rate of one a minute.

- that the second Sav-Rite filled 7,185 prescriptions between Sept. 26, 2008 and Jan. 26, 2009, and that all but 24 were issued under Abad's authority.

- that most people who went to Justice Medical paid cash, including a $150 fee for first-time visitors, and that the cash register at the pharmacy next to Justice Medical was so full employees had trouble closing it and that the Medicare and Medicaid programs paid the Kermit pharmacy more than $10 million between November 2005 and November 2008.

The conclusion is inescapable: The government is fueling the prescription drug abuse problem about which it wrings its hands.

http://www.dailymail.com/Opinion/Editorials/200904021796

- that business was so brisk in 2006 that the Kermit pharmacy dispensed almost 3.2 million hydrocodone pills - more than any other pharmacy in West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia.