“Has Florida finally elected a certifiable whack job as governor?”

By Carl Hiaasen

Last week, as drug agents secretly prepared to raid more than a dozen South Florida pill mills, Gov. Rick Scott reaffirmed his staunch opposition to a statewide computer database that would track prescriptions of Vicodin, Percocet and other dangerous narcotics.
Said Scott: “I don’t support the database. I believe it’s an invasion of privacy.”
His statement raises numerous questions, none of them comforting.

Has Florida finally elected a certifiable whack job as governor?
Is Scott himself overmedicating?
Undermedicating?
Why would any sane or sober public official go out of his way — very publicly — to protect pill pushers and crooked doctors?
Thirty-eight states use databases to keep track of oxycodone and other painkillers that are now the most widely abused (and lethal) drugs in the country.
Florida is the largest state without such a database, and the undisputed epicenter of the sleazy illegal pill trade.
In the first six months of 2010, doctors in Florida prescribed nine times more oxycodone than was sold in the entire United States during that same period. Pain mills here have prospered wildly and proliferated – in Broward County alone there are 130.
Two years ago, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved a painkiller database, which would be privately funded. Law enforcement officers say it’s an absolutely essential tool for attacking storefront clinics and the drug dealers who flock to Florida from throughout the eastern United States.
The database should have been up and running by now, but bid disputes with private contractors have delayed implementation. Authorities were hoping to have the computerized system in place this spring, but then Scott took office and announced his intention to kill it, along with the state anti-drug office that conceived it.
No one can fathom why. Conitnue reading Carl Hiassen here.