For years, Florida’s repeated failure to rein in its homegrown prescription painkiller scourge nourished a bumper crop of opioid addicts and dealers.

It was widely reported that rogue clinics in Palm Beach and Broward counties funneled OxyContin and fueled addiction in Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and West Virginia.

It was much worse.

DEA reports and federal court records show that by 2010, Florida was the reliable opioid dealer of choice to users and dealers in not only the Southeast, but also in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes regions — an area spanning virtually every state east of the Mississippi River.

And when Florida finally turned off the free-flowing oxycodone spigot in 2011, drug users in states once fed by Florida oxycodone did exactly what users in Palm Beach County and Florida did: They turned to heroin.

Tallahassee saw it coming. Florida had a plan to stop the pill mill scourge before it took hold. It had free money to put the plan into action. At the very top, law enforcement officials knew heroin would follow the free-flowing pills.

Politicians did nothing.

In refusing to crack down for a decade, Florida provided more than pills.

It extended by years the amount of time that OxyContin and pills containing its highly addictive ingredient, oxycodone, would be available.

The failure to act gave a 12-year-old who might not have been interested in sampling oxycodone in 2001 another 10 years of free-flowing pills to reconsider. It gave vulnerable users time for addiction to take root and deepen. It gave budding crime rings time to form, and existing criminal enterprises time to branch out.

It paved the way for heroin.

The idea that Florida’s 2011 crackdown helped trigger the epidemic now sweeping through much of the country has not been seriously considered.