“She was certainly not the first doctor to over-prescribe opioids,” says Craig Taffaro, a licensed counselor who served as St. Bernard Parish president from 2008 to 2012. “But she opened a door that otherwise had not been opened. What she unleashed can still be felt in St. Bernard.”
With Cleggett gone, a dozen new pain clinics popped up across New Orleans, seeking to capture her patient base. The epidemic worsened. In late 2004, the parish coroner lamented the unabated overdose death toll, attributing most of them to “recreational use of prescription pills.”
The problems persist today. In the last few years, St. Bernard has posted the second-highest drug overdose rate in Louisiana, higher than any of its neighboring parishes, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's county health rankings.
Selected cuts from the article.
Why would it take 5 years AFTER the clinic was closed by the LA Board of Medical Examiners to bring a case against Dr. Cleggett?
How in the world could almost two dozen licensed and sworn police officers provide “security” to this pill mill - and pretend to not notice what was going on?
And today the opioid epidemic continues to kill its partakers and anyone they meet on the road.
$300 a shift would cause them to not see anything untoward. And it is New Orleans in Louisiana. That’s how it is down there. Do you remember reading how the local police acted during Katrina? They are every bit as Third World as is Ninth ward or Mali.