Abuses of prescription painkillers is a hard pill for state lawmakers to swallow. So-called "pill mills" have transformed much of Florida into "the painkiller capital of the United States, the notorious home to a cottage industry of storefront pain clinics selling alarming numbers of narcotics and feeding a brazen black market," state Rep. John Legg said in a press release. ...more

October 24, 2009

Ben Welch knows that he came close to death. And every time the 13-year-old Seffner boy runs a fever or gets a scratch, his family recalls the nearly two-year ordeal that cut short his soccer career and almost cut short his life. ...more

October 8, 2008

Erin Flatley was 23 years old, a pretty, blue-eyed blonde attending graduate school at the University of South Florida. She wanted to be a teacher. But in 2002, Flatley went to the hospital for a minor outpatient surgical procedure. Six days later, she was dead. ...more

September 14, 2007