Breathless Brit Reports on America's "Pillbilly" Scammers and the Coming "Pharmageddon"

The colonies are facing an unprecedented public health crisis, according to a hilariously melodramatic report in the Guardian. Palm Beach-based Ed Pilkington has the "scoop":

Chad is one of thousands of "pillbillies" who descend on Florida every year from across the south and east coasts of America. Some come in trucks bearing telltale number plates from Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, even far-away Ohio. Others come by the busload on the apocryphally named Oxycodone Express.

Who calls it the Oxycodone Express, I wonder? There is no time for sourcing! 

Every day in Florida seven people die having overdosed on prescriptiondrugs – 2,531 died in 2009 alone. That statistic is replicated across the US, where almost 30,000 people died last year from abusing pharmaceutical pills.

It's an American catastrophe that has been dubbed pharmageddon, though it rarely pierces the public consciousness. Occasionally a celebrity overdose will attract attention – Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson – but they are specks in a growing mountain of human mortality.

The White House last month said the abuse of prescription drugs had become the US's fastest-growing drug problem.

Declaring the trend an "alarming public health crisis", it pointed out that people were dying unintentionally from painkiller overdoses at rates that exceeded the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and the black tar heroin epidemic of the 1970s combined.

Again, note the lack of sourcing on "pharmageddon." 

While prescription drugs may now surpass old people who cannot see over the steering wheel as a notable killer of Floridians, they don't even break the top eight, which were, as of 2007: heart disease (41,956 deaths per year), cancer (39,790), chronic lower respiratory disease (9,317), unintentional injury (9,020), stroke (8,715), diabetes (5,092), Alzheimer's (4,632), and nephritis (2,906). 

While those numbers are four years old, it's safe to assume that they've likely increased as Florida's population has increased (it gained two seats in the House after the 2010 Census). If we also assume that the Office of National Drug Control Policy numbers aren't inflated, pillbilly death ranks between suicide (2,570) and–wait for it–cirhosis (2,224).