vanguard blog | February 04, 2010 | 18 comments

Essential Super Bowl party supplies: chips, dip, and ’scrips

 

If you’re heading to the “Big Dance” this weekend—that is, the Super Bowl—grab a copy of the local independent weekly and learn how fucked up Florida is. This week’s issue of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times comes with a “Vice Guide” for Super Bowl revelers, which includes tips like “Scoring Coke like a Local.”

 

But if you’re scoring cocaine in South Florida, you might as well be sporting a five o’clock shadow, loafers and a flourescent sport coat. These days, everyone in South Florida knows that prescription drugs, particularly OxyContin and Xanax, is what everybody’s doing.

 

“As in the 80’s and 90’s cocaine was a big thing, now prescriptions have just exploded,” Sgt. Richard Pisanti of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office told Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller last May.

 

Or as the New Times puts it in their “Vice Guide: Procuring Party Pills”:

“In Florida, OxyContin and Xanax aren't the new cocaine; they're coke plus heroin, pot, meth, and all hallucinogens combined.”

 

See, the New Times has got you covered. And the great thing about their guide to scoring prescription drugs is that after reading it you can just flip to the back to the paper and find 10 pages of advertisements for the pain clinic/Dr. Feelgoods they tell you supply the pills. You know, 10 pages of ad revenue that help pay for stories like where to get your pills. It’s a beautiful cycle.

 

I’ll give the New Times credit for at least disclosing some disturbing statistics about Florida’s prescription drug problem:

“In 2008, about half the illegal prescription drugs in this country came from the Sunshine State, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency…Three times as many people here die from prescription pills than from all other drugs combined, according to a Florida Medical Examiners Commission report that was published in 2008.”

 

But for a better picture of what’s going in the “Colombia of prescription drugs” check out the Vanguard documentary “The OxyContin Express.”

 

 

Watch the full episode at Current.com.

 

Or, of course, you can follow the New Times guide, learn for yourself—and hopefully not be one of the 11 people in Florida who OD everyday from pills.

Follow Darren Foster on Twitter: @fineyoungman.

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