As a prosecutor, a politician, and a pundit, Dave Aronberg has opinions — and he wasn’t afraid to share them at a Capital City Tiger Bay Club luncheon in Tallahassee on Tuesday.
Most of his prepared remarks focused on his recently published book, “Fighting the Florida Shuffle[1],” which takes a deep dive into opioid drug problems and a flawed drug treatment system — while proposing specific actions to alter well-intentioned federal laws being abused by bad actors.
But in a question-and-answer session afterward, Aronberg also weighed in on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and what he calls her “red line,” the state of the national Democratic Party, antisemitism, and a Tallahassee murder conspiracy trial.
When it comes to drug abuse and treatment, the Palm Beach County native knows whereof he speaks. One of his first assignments at the turn of the century as an assistant Attorney General under Florida AG Bob Butterworth was to investigate Purdue Pharma, which by then had been marketing the dangerous, addictive “new” pain-relieving drug, OxyContin, for about five years.
After a stint in the Florida Senate, Aronberg would campaign for Attorney General on the state’s drug crisis but was eliminated in the primary. Republican Bondi, who ultimately was elected to the office in that race, reached across the aisle to tap him as the state’s “drug czar.”
“It was not easy for her to do that, but she did, and we shut down pill mills … and we got the PDMP (Prescription Drug Monitoring Program) passed,” he said. “We were able to make some real progress when we worked together in a bipartisan way. Unfortunately, when you eliminated the supply of these drugs, the demand didn’t go away. So people … went from oxycodone to heroin. And then everything spiked with fentanyl.”
He would go on to serve three terms as the State Attorney for Palm Beach County starting in 2013, where drug problems were again top of mind, as his home county became a hotbed of criminality relating to substance use disorder treatment, what Aronberg termed the Florida Shuffle.
His book, coauthored with Dr. David Campbell, includes anecdotal stories of young adults and their families lured by promises of sunshine, serenity and sobriety, only to discover themselves trapped by a system of treatment centers and sober houses that prioritized money over recovery — with kickbacks for placements, unnecessary and overpriced testing, at best — and criminal abuse resulting in overdose or death, at worst.
As State Attorney, Aronberg created a Sober Home Task Force to address the crisis, which had great success and is now a model for the rest of the state and around the nation.
“Florida went from the weakest laws in the country to the strongest laws in the country. We went from having a slap on the wrist for patient brokering to making it into a felony (and) making a one-way plane tickets into a felony,” he told the group. “It’s amazing how a pair of steel bracelets will influence someone’s behavior.”
Problems still exist in the system, but they won’t be solved at state or local level — or even with money — because well-intended federal laws favored by Democrats are throwing up roadblocks to ultimate success, Aronberg said.
“It’s the ACA, the ADA, HIPAA, which keeps parents from knowing where their kids are going when their kids are now all of a sudden sent down to Florida with a one-way plane ticket. If you’re over 18, your parents don’t get to know.”
“The fact that you are here listening to this means that you now know more than 99% of the individuals in Congress,” he told the group. “They have the power to do something about this. Thankfully, you have a voice and you can ask them, ‘What are you doing about the Florida shuffle? Why are you letting this happen? And if their response is more money for rehab, you know they’re not paying attention and maybe we should have new people in Congress.”
Democrats fear that changing the laws might lead to the Affordable Care Act and others being completely overturned, saying, “If we try to tweak this, someone’s gonna overturn the whole thing.” He counters with, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
These days, Aronberg has his own legal practice (Mike Tyson is a client), is a strategic consultant for Capital City Consulting, and migrates between MSNBC[2] and other channels and podcasts weighing in on the legal issues d’jour.
“I love doing it,” he said of his commentary gigs. “It fills my political void of not being in office. I get to talk about issues without having to take bad votes. So I love the whole media business.”
He has spent time over the past couple weeks weighing in on the murder trial of Donna Adelson, who was found guilty of hiring men to kill Dan Markel, her ex-son-in-law, in his Tallahassee home 11 years ago. The two hitmen, a go-between and her son have already been convicted in the case and there is speculation his ex-wife may be charged for her role in his death.
Aronberg quipped: “If I were Wendi Adelson, I would not be buying any green bananas.”
One of his opinions relates to his old boss:
“Pam Bondi will do the right thing in the end. I still believe that she will not prosecute Trump’s political enemies purely for political reasons. If she wanted to do that, she could have … walked out all those people in handcuffs — and the right wing is is very upset with her that she hasn’t done it.”
Aronberg encouraged his niece to attend Florida State University rather than a northeastern college she’d been accepted to because of antisemitism on those campuses.
“I’ve been troubled by the rise of antisemitism in this country and in my political party. And if you want to know why I’m still a Democrat, it’s because the extremists have not taken over the party yet. The fact that Hakeem Jeffries is refusing to endorse (New York Mayoral candidate Zohran) Mamdani to me is a reason why I I’m a Democrat because he is the leader, not Mamdani.”
“Florida Shuffle” offers a sympathetic view of the scourge of drug abuse. Aronberg puts it this way:
“I’ve seen so many families wrecked and yet there are people out there who think … drug addiction is a moral failing, (that) people make the choice to get high and they deserve what they get,” he said. “That is so myopic and also so heartless because most of the people in the throes of addiction today got there because they were given a prescription by a doctor who were told that the prescription was safe and non-addictive — when neither was true.”
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References
- ^ Fighting the Florida Shuffle (www.amazon.com)
- ^ MSNBC (www.msnbc.com)