AIDS in South Florida

In 2005, authorities dismantled a drug smuggling ring in Miami. This is nothing out of the ordinary for the city that the United States Drug Enforcement website cites as a primary area for drug trafficking and money laundering organizations.

However, the drug was not cocaine or heroin, but a drug used to treat AIDS. Those arrested were not the usual suspects, but two Miami physicians who produced fake documentation and wrote excessive prescriptions for the illness in order to sell the drugs on the black market and two others who recruited and paid Medicaid patients to see the doctors.

While we might applaud the dismantling of a ring that conned the health care system for our poor out of more than a million dollars, as did Governor Crist in a press release on the Attorney General of Florida’s website, it begs the questions of how and why these precious drugs had to be peddled in the first place.

Last year, I came across a Mother Jones article that described how family members in the United States would buy black market AIDS drugs and send them home to places devastated with AIDS, like the Dominican Republic. A Dominican physician interviewed for the article said he would tell patients where to buy the illegal drugs even though these drugs are sometimes older versions and are always very expensive.

AIDS drugs are so much more accessible in the States that patients can choose not to take the drugs to treat their illness and peddle them instead. The article told of an American AIDS patient who sold his AIDS medication for illegal drugs. Even the lucky few in other countries whose families in the States send them the AIDS drugs resell the extra pills to other locales desperate to prolong their life. This is especially prevalent in areas with estimated rates of AIDS infection as high as 17% of the population, such as in certain parts of the Dominican Republic, whose rate of infected people is second only to Africa.

(Santiago, Dominican Republic)

I may not be from South Florida, but after four years of living here, I feel like I’ve learned a thing or two about the people who lay their heads to rest in the city of Miami. I would say “who call Miami home,” but the unique thing about many people who live in Miami is that they do not consider this city to be their home. The people of Miami tend to keep close ties to their roots because of Miami’s unique cultural dynamic, sometimes called a multicultural mosaic. For example, because many are fairly new arrivals, they are likely to flock to one of the several enclaves of Caribbean, South American, and Central American communities, like Little Havana or Little Haiti. In these communities, they have little reason to hurry the assimilation process along because they do not cut ties with their home country and find they can get by without even learning English.

Because of Miami’s proximity and strong cultural ties to places devastated by AIDS, one would think that coverage about AIDS in those countries would be much more prevalent, but it seems that the presence of AIDS drugs has hushed the interest in the disease. The accessibility of AIDS medication in the States has quieted the fears of the epidemic and, unfortunately, the cries of those who do not have access to the life-prolonging drugs, leaving them to choose between dying or obtaining the drugs illegally if they can afford them.


LINKS:

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/states/florida.html
http://myfloridalegal.com/newsrel.nsf/newsreleases/B1AA06B8001B37C4852570CA0055D3B6 http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2007/05/pill_pipeline.html
http://www.med.miami.edu/communications/som_news/index.asp?id=36
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/cuba/sfl-oeditor26nov26,0,5614504.story?coll=sofla_news_local_cuba_promo