
The Oxycontin Express
Correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to South Florida to document how the state became what one investigator calls the Colombia of prescription drugs. Storefront pain clinics, some doing more cash business than casinos, hand out OxyContin prescriptions with almost no questions asked, and van Zeller follows buyers who drive up from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio to fill them by the bottle before hauling the pills back north to sell. She sits in on clinic visits, rides along with addicts making the run, and talks to DEA agents and doctors trying to explain why Florida's lax regulations turned it into a supply hub for a nationwide addiction. Interviews with grieving families put faces on the overdose numbers, while clinic operators defend their business as legal medicine. The film traces the route pill by pill, from a Fort Lauderdale strip mall to a truck stop hundreds of miles away, showing how a legal prescription becomes street currency. This Peabody Award-winning Vanguard episode is blunt about the scale of the trade and the paper-thin laws that allowed it.