Introduction: Commander John Burke

I was with the Cincinnati Police Department ... just a brief background, for 32 years. My last nine years I formed and started the police division's pharmaceutical diversion squad. And am now the commander of actually the Warren County Drug Task Force which is a task force just north of Cincinnati.

But during the time ... the last nine years it was Cincinnati ... we probably investigated about four or five thousand drug diversion cases resulting in about 1,500-1,600 arrests and an overall statistic look at about two million dosage units. So we had quite a bit of experience in relation to diversion. I'm also the vice president of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators, and a lot of you won't be familiar with that group, but basically it's about 1,600 members across the United States that are law enforcement regulatory agents and also health care fraud folks and health professionals. And our interest is providing education to those folks primarily in the field of drug diversion.

And, needless to say of course, pain management is very real and something that we address every year. We spend an entire day on that as a matter of fact, and providing our people with pain management education. And I think probably the last thing I want to say before we get started is that our interest in NADDI and my interest personally is that we pursue people that are diverting drugs and violating the law, at the same time ... and it's not an easy task, but at the same time do our very best to safeguard those that are in legitimate pain.