Port St. Lucie, FL police make biggest prescription drug bust in years

July 9, 2008
Police have made the biggest undercover prescription painkiller bust in about a decade, an arrest that comes after three dozen overdose deaths since 2007, a sergeant said Tuesday.

Tiffany A. Kennedy, 31, of Palm Beach Gardens, faces a felony trafficking in Oxycodone charge after a deal July 3 at a McDonald's restaurant on Southwest St. Lucie West Boulevard that resulted in the seizure of more than 440 OxyContin pills, Sgt. Derek Brieske said.

"If you consider that law enforcement gets an average of 5 to 8 percent of the drugs that are out there, we've got an epidemic," Brieske said. "Certainly with the number of deaths that we have we have a situation that is out of control."

He said there have been 12 overdose deaths "associated with Oxycodone and OxyContin" in Port St. Lucie this year.

"In 2007 we had 24," he said.

OxyContin is a time release drug that can produce a powerful high when crushed and snorted or injected. Some illicit drug users favor OxyContin over heroin because the quality is known, and there's no risk of impurities.

"The high is unlike heroin in the sense that it's quicker, it lasts longer and they don't have to worry about getting sold a bad batch," Brieske said.

In many cases, the drug is obtained through prescription fraud or "doctor shopping," a practice in which a patient gets prescriptions from multiple doctors without the other doctors' knowledge.

Police learned of Kennedy through other arrests, and an investigator called her posing as a potential client. Arrangements ultimately were made to sell 200 OxyContin and 20 Oxycodone pills for $7,130.

Kennedy arrived in a sport utility vehicle and was arrested after a smaller exchange of cash for pills, though investigators ended up seizing more than 440 OxyContin pills. Police are investigating where Kennedy got the pills.

"If we had this many people dying from gunshots I think that we would have the National Guard in here," Brieske said.

He said over the past four or five months, police have seized more than 2,100 pills.

Brieske said most of the pills likely are coming from "pain clinics." People with legitimate physical ailments can get 200 or so pills prescribed to them.

"That pill bottle that they might have paid $400 or $500 for automatically becomes $5,000 sitting in their hand," he said. "They can turn around and sell those in a short amount of time like the undercover bust that was demonstrated at the McDonald's."