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New state controls
on use of narcotics urged at hearing in Tallahassee.
Publication: The Sun-Sentinel
By John Kennedy
Tallahassee Bureau
Tallahassee • Parents
armed with posters of their dead children came to a
drug symposium Wednesday at the state Capitol focused
on skyrocketing prescription drug abuse in the state.
Teresa Ashcraft, of DeBary,
brought a shot of her 19 old son Bobby Ashcraft in a
tuxedo, scrawled with the handwritten message: “OxyContin
killed his future.”
“It doesn’t matter
if you live in a slum or a pillared mansion,”
said Ashcraft, a cafeteria manager with thee Volusia
County school system. “People are dying from these
drugs, and we have to stop it.”
The symposium, which drew Gov.
Jeb Bush, Attorney General Charlie Crist, and state
and national drug experts, was the latest in a series
of efforts aimed at rallying support to curb prescription-drug
abuse, which officials said is killing an average of
five Floridians a day.
“This is a horrible situation
that we need to deal with, and we will,” Bush
said.
Turning to the half-dozen parents
lining a front row at the hearing, Bush said their presence
“puts a human face on an issue that is so painful,
for so many families in this state.”
Barbara Waldron, of Palm Beach
Gardens, grew tearful when recalling her daughter, Blair,
who struggled for years with depression before dying
last February of a fatal mix of Xanax, an anti-anxiety
medication, cocaine and heroin, just hours after being
released from the hospital.
Maryann Carey, of Delray Beach,
remembered her son Steven, 25, as a free spirit, who
used cocaine, Xanax, OxyContin, a narcotic pain reliever,
the night he died. “He was a party person,”
Carey said. “They called themselves the weekend
warriors. But he didn’t get his drugs through
prescription. They’re on the streets.”
The grieving parents said they
thought legislation now in the works could have helped
spare their children.
The legislation would create a new prescription-tracking
database, financed partly by Purdue Pharma, the Connecticut
maker of OxyContin. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has
reported that deaths in Florida from prescription drugs
were topping those from illegal drugs and that state
regulators have largely failed to curb run away Medicaid
prescription costs for pain-relief patches, sleeping
pills, tranquilizers and other highly abused drugs. |
