“I know you told Bella some of this already,
but can you school me a little bit? How does a pill mill—how does all of this
work?”
Edgar nodded vigorously as Bosch asked the
question, jumping at the opportunity to show some expertise to the man who had
always doubted him.
“They call the people involved in the mills
‘cappers,’” he said. “They run the show and you need unscrupulous doctors and
pharmacies in the mix to make it all work.”
“The cappers are not the doctors or
pharmacists?” Bosch asked.
“No, they’re the bosses. It starts with them
either opening a clinic or going into an existing clinic in a marginal
neighborhood. They go to a dirtbag doctor, somebody just this side of having
their license revoked. A lot of docs that worked in the medical marijuana
joints are perfect candidates. The capper goes in and says, ‘Doc, how’d you
like to make five grand a week for a couple mornings in my clinic?’ That’s good
money for somebody like that and they sign up.”
“And they start writing prescriptions.”
“Exactly, the cappers line up the shills in
the morning, and they get their scrips from the doctor—no good-faith physical
exam, nothing legit about it—and then they go out and get in a van and the
capper drives them to the pharmacies to get the pills. Usually, it’s more than
one pharmacy in cahoots so they can spread it out and try to fly under the
radar for as long as possible. A lot of them have multiple IDs, so they hit
two, three, places a day and it doesn’t come up on the computer. Doesn’t matter
that the phony IDs are for shit, because the pharmacist is in on it. He doesn’t
look too close at anything.”
“And then the pills go to the capper?”
“Exactly right. Most of these shills,
they’re addicts themselves. That capper is the straw boss and he reports to
somebody down the line, and he’s gotta make sure nobody guzzles those pills. So
he keeps everybody in the van and they hit the pharmacies, maybe two going in
at a time, and they turn those pills over right away when they get back to the
van. The capper will front them what they need out of the day’s haul to
maintain their addiction and keep them working. He keeps them high and keeps
them moving. It’s a trap. They get in and they can’t get out.” (Connelly,
Michael. Two Kinds of Truth (A Harry Bosch Novel Book 20) pp. 102-103)
interestingly, both lee child and michael connelly have written their most recent novels about the opioid endemic, from different angles, of which the latter is civilian and thus more near the reality (2017-11-12 5:47 AM)
