She overdosed and died in her grandparent’s home on March 8, the first day of the 2011 Florida legislative session. The 18-year-old had relapsed and taken Opana, an opioid frequently trafficked by pill mills. She had been found by her father.

Almost immediately, her parents, Lisa and Gavin Meshad, got on the phone with Scott.

“As a desperate parent who just buried your child, why would you not pick up your phone if you could?” said Lisa Meshad. Meshad said she believed Scott, whom she supports, was in a difficult position over the database. “I think he did listen,” she said.

Lisa Meshad, now Lisa Brandy, drove to Tallahassee, friends and family with her in a car caravan to lobby in support of the prescription monitoring database and tough new laws reining in pill mills. “We demanded a response, and it came from grieving parents.”

When she walked into Bondi’s office out of a freezing rain, Brandi’s picture was already on the attorney general’s desk.

Testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee on the dangers of prescription drug abuse weeks after Brandi’s death, Scott abruptly announced he would endorse the monitoring database.

“A good friend of mine’s 18-year-old just died two weeks weeks ago of an overdose, and he found her,” Scott said at the hearing.

Like Bush before him, Scott had his own personal back story, which he rarely shared.

“I have a family member that has been addicted his whole life, never beat it,” said Scott of a brother. “He started at a young age and never beat it.” Scott, through his office, declined to say whether the teenager’s death helped change his mind.

Bondi was wearing a rubber wrist bracelet with Brandi’s name on it as she and Scott watched Florida lawmakers finally take a floor vote on the pill mill laws. The newly installed attorney general had been up till 2:30 in the morning lobbying for their passage.

In June, Scott signed off on the pill mill laws.

In September 2011, the database went live.

In October, doctors and law enforcement could look up a patients’ drug history for the first time to determine who was doctor shopping for pills, and which doctors were prescribing huge quantities of opioids.

Florida emergency room overdoses from oxycodone and similar opioids immediately began dropping. So did deaths. The street price of oxycodone soared.

The pill pipeline supplying half the country began drying up.

But worse was coming.