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    American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic
    American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic
    American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic
    Audiobook10 hours

    American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

    Written by John Temple

    Narrated by Charlie Thurston

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The king of the Florida pill mills was American Pain, a mega-clinic expressly created to serve addicts posing as patients. From a fortresslike former bank building, American Pain's doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts who came by the vanload. Inked muscleheads ran the clinic's security. Former strippers operated the pharmacy, counting out pills and stashing cash in garbage bags. Under their lab coats, the doctors carried guns, and it was all legal . . . sort of.

    American Pain chronicles the rise and fall of this game-changing pill mill and how it helped tip the nation into its current opioid crisis. The narrative, which swings back and forth between Florida and Kentucky, is populated by a diverse cast of characters. This includes the incongruous band of wealthy bad boys, thugs, and esteemed physicians who built American Pain, as well as the penniless Kentucky clans who transformed themselves into painkiller trafficking rings. It includes addicts whose lives were devastated by American Pain's drugs, and the federal agents and grieving mothers who labored for years to bring the clinic's crew to justice.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 3, 2015
    ISBN9781494588915
    American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic
    Author

    John Temple

    John Temple is an investigative journalist and the author of American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic, which was named a New York Post “Favorite Book of 2015” and a 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee for Fact Crime. Temple wrote two previous nonfiction books: The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates and Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner’s Office. The American Society of Legal Writers awarded The Last Lawyer the 2010 Scribes Book Award. Temple is a tenured journalism professor at West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media. Before academia, Temple worked as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh, North Carolina and Florida.

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    Reviews for American Pain

    4/5

    36 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Interesting book for those interested in the opioid epidemic and how people, including doctors, can rationalize participating in it. Written from the criminals perspective rather than law enforcement. Would recommend.
    • 5/5
      True crime that reads like fiction. Explains the sad current state of affairs through a powerful and propulsive narrative. If you want to understand the roots of the American opioid epidemic, read this!
    • 4/5
      The first thing I will note is that I found the characters a little difficult to keep straight - they all seemed very similar to each other in attitude and behaviour so when they referred to each other, it would take me a second to figure out which was the head guy and which the 'muscle', etc.The second thing of note is that the 'vignette' stories chosen to demonstrate just how bad this Oxy issue is were a bit scattered, or perhaps the better word is thin... the author spent 80% of the book looking at the main characters and their drug marketing process but the 20% which looked at (real) people's issues with the drug, or the company, seemed randomly inserted. Sure, they were interesting, but the flow was not really logical - we read 4 chapters about the business, then a vignette chapter about an addict dying from a drug overdose, then 2 chapters of business, then a chapter with another set of characters drug addiction, etc. There didn't seem to be a pattern, unless it was meant to be a time-scale thing, but that was not clear.I did, however, Google this organization when I finished the book and it seems the story was based on real characters, and real addicts so perhaps the weird addition of certain addicts' details was because those one were the ones whose information was public due to lawsuits, or whatever... and the rest of the addicts' story were just a conglomeration of stories blended together.Anyway, all that being said, I couldn't put the book down. I don't understand how they were allowed to run this business this way, and/or why they had to go so far with it that they got arrested... because until some (unclear) tipping point, what they were doing was legal (which is sad in and of itself). Though I suppose once you start making so much money each day that you have to put it into garbage cans, you might realize you probably crossed a line somewhere.
    • 3/5
      The title is probably the most promising thing; the author leaves all the lessons for the reader to draw. The story of one of Florida’s many, many pain clinics, handing out pain pills to anyone who asks and thus contributing to an epidemic of addiction. As with mortgage mills, most of the principals’ attention goes into making the paperwork look good, in case the feds come knocking.