Pain clinic? Or "pill house"? Or even some of both? At issue is The Pain Express clinic that opened Feb. 1 in Kennesaw and operated for barely more than a month before closing in the wake of allegations that it was prescribing large doses of pain-killing pills that in many cases were then being sold illegally on the street.

According to Kennesaw Police Chief Bill Westenberger, patients could show up without an appointment; the clinic accepted payments only in cash; and no insurance claims were filed. In addition, the on-site doctor handed out industrial-strength pain medications such as Oxycodone from the clinic's in-house pharmacy and wrote prescriptions for medicines the clinic did not have, he said.

The clinic had been open for only a matter of days before complaints were being filed with the Kennesaw police, who to their credit were proactive in their investigation.

"The Friday after they opened, a man called to say that his daughter was working at a business near there and that she was terrified because people kept coming in and locking themselves in the bathroom for 30 minutes at a time. We also received word that a local pharmacy had run out of its entire inventory of OxyContin within just a few days of the clinic being open. So these certainly raised some red flags," Westenberger said.

Police stepped up their monitoring and noticed that even though the clinic was brand new, it had prospective patients lined out the door and around the building, many of them from Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

The investigation prompted clinic owner Jeff George to fly up from Miami to meet with the chief and other city officials, including Mayor Mark Mathews.

"Mr. George also said what they were doing was legal, but I told him that what people were doing when they left the clinic probably wasn't," the police chief said. "I just kept saying I couldn't understand why someone would drive from Kentucky to Georgia to get to a pain clinic, passing by hundreds and hundreds of other doctors and clinics. He said it was just good advertising and that people just wanted to come to his clinics."

Then on March 3, the feds raided three of George's clinics in Florida, and the Kennesaw clinic was closed by George soon after. According to documents filed in U.S. District Court in south Florida on March 3, George and his brothers set up their Pain Express there in January 2008 and made more than $14 million in cash deposits in 2009.

The documents also quote an undercover investigator saying that people were traveling from Kentucky, Ohio and South Carolina to the Florida clinics and buying Oxycodone (a heroin-like painkiller, and equally addictive) for $5 a pill, then reselling in their home states for $80 a pill.

As it turns out, unlike its neighbors, Georgia does not have electronic prescription monitoring programs that allow law enforcement, doctors and pharmacists to keep tabs on the distribution of such meds, according to Westenberger.

"Keep in mind, Kentucky is one of the most progressive and regulatory states when it comes to prescription drugs, and that is where most of the out-of-state people were coming from."

But that could be soon to change. The Georgia Senate passed a measure Wednesday, the Georgia Patient Safety Act, (SB 418) that would address some of those questions. Meanwhile, the Cobb Board of Commissioners has put on hold the acceptance of any zoning, permit and license applications for medical clinics through June 30. And the Kennesaw City Council has a special called meeting for Wednesday at which a similar moratorium is expected to be put in place.

"One reason we did this is because we need time to come up with a definition of medical clinics that are eligible to operate in Cobb so we don't have something like this come up. We've never had a pill house like this in Cobb County, and there are many legitimate clinics in Cobb, so we don't want to penalize those that are legit," County Community Development Director Rob Hosack said. Those with legitimate need for such medications aren't likely to be impaired by the moratoriums, and those with other uses for them will hopefully be stymied by them.

In the meantime, local and state officials will have breathing room in which to put in place the kind of regulations needed to ensure that those who truly need such meds will still have access to them - and that those with other goals in mind for them will not.