The Holly Springs City Council on Monday night approved the first ordinance in Cherokee County designed to block "pill mills" from opening in the city. Marietta was the first city in Cobb to pass a similar ordinance. These businesses are known for issuing unneeded and excessive narcotics prescriptions to customers.
The ordinance allows the city to require pain management clinic applicants fill out surveys detailing how they plan to operate before granting them business licenses.
This will ensure businesses are operating "the right way," Holly Springs Community Development Director Brantley Day said.
The city wanted to create a license just for pain clinics, but state law prohibits it, Day said.
"It's really not possible to separate them," he said, adding the city will classify pain management clinics as either a pharmacy or a medical establishment.
Pill mills have become an epidemic nationwide, according to law enforcement agencies, with operators allowing people to choose what drugs they want without medical necessity and often pay cash. Heavy duty painkillers such as Oxycontin are a popular at pill mills.
Woodstock's City Attorney Eldon Basham is in the midst of drafting an ordinance regulating pain management clinics for the Woodstock City Council to consider approving.
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These pill mills should concern us all, as the pills sold by shady doctors without exams to Holly Springs pushers end up at Pope, Lassiter, Harrison and other Cobb high schools. And the people who drive down I-75 from other states as far north as Ohio just to buy the pills (because their states are ahead of us on this issue and have made it more difficult to find these Class 3 drugs)bring their own brand of crime and sleaziness to our community. In West Virginia,where the FBI estimates up to 40 percent of drivers on the road at any given time are under the indfluence of Class 3 drugs, tragedies happen all the time. The FBI busts these places, finding hundreds of thousands in cash, fake exam rooms, doctors who've lost their licenses or circumvent real medical controls to become pushers. Pharmacies dole out 100 times more of these addictive drugs, which corrode our youth and ruin lives. Said my piece. Way to go Holly Springs!