Pill Mill.

Law New York Magazine reports on this month's raid of the biggest "pill mill" in the city and I've gained an extra piece of knowledge being young and naive enough to know that there was such a thing as a "pill mill". A "pill mill" is a drugs den in which real Doctors dispense prescribable drugs for recreational purposes which are inevitably more difficult to prosecute because the police have the extra burden of having to prove, beyond reasonable doubt that the establishment and its employees aren't dispensing prescribable drugs for medical reasons:

"The first physician to be noticed over-prescribing at an Astramed clinic wasn’t Lowe, but a doctor named Tomasito Virey, who in the summer of 2012 made it to the top of the New York State Department of Health’s list of frequent prescribers of Oxycodone. The previous year, he’d signed 3,208 individual prescriptions — that’s 60 scrips a week, or 48 percent more prescriptions than the next closest physician. When a local NBC reporter asked Virey why he prescribed so much Oxy, the doctor replied, “We have a lot, a lot, a lot of sick patients.” Even back then, neighbors were calling Astramed a pill mill. But the local NBC report effectively derailed an investigation the DEA had been conducting into the clinic. Virey stopped prescribing Oxycodone as soon as he became a TV news star, and that Astramed office closed up shop, putting the Feds back at square one. "