DEA Wants Inside Medical Records to Fight the War on Drugs
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
The Obama administration disagrees, and argues that
since the records have already been submitted to a third
party (Oregon’s PDMP) that patients no longer enjoy an
expectation of privacy.
So by that logic, if I want to maintain my expectation of privacy regarding my prescriptions, I can either A) Not have them filled (so that I don't 'voluntarily' give them to a 3rd party) or B) source them illegally.
Seems like great options to me.
I'll also quibble about this part:
> since you voluntarily gave your phone records to your phone company
You didn't "give your phone records to your phone company." You never had any phone records. Your phone company created those records. That's another distinction with the case here: Oregon's PDMP didn't create those records. It received them with strict federal requirements as to how to handle them.
Pretty sure that was the entire point of the post.
Here's a response, post law suit, for the Chicago's mayor's office's phone records.
Additionally, the Illinois Attorney General's Office Public Access Counselor ("PAC") has established that City-issued cell phone numbers are exempt from disclosure pursuant to 5 ILLS 140/7(1)(c), because the disclosure of these numbers would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. As the PAC reasoned, certain City employees are issued cell phones so they may be on call during non-work hours or while away from their offices. Disclosure of these numbers could subject staff to excessive phone calls from the public at all times of day. Further, if staff were forced to turn off their cell phones to reduce such intrusion, they may not be readily available to attend to the business of the public body, defeating the purpose of issuing them cell phones. (See 2010 PAC 8685, issued September 30, 2010, attached hereto as Ex. B.)
Thus, the only phone numbers which are not exempt under FOIA are those that are publically listed and are not home telephone numbers, personal telephone numbers, or work-issued cell phone numbers. In other words, FOIA only compels the production of listed numbers belonging to businesses, governmental agencies and other entities, and only those numbers which are not work-issued cell phones.
Yet.. per FOIA:
The disclosure of information that bears on the public duties of public employees and officials shall not be considered an invasion of personal privacy.
In any case, I still got enough to make this (two tabs): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hgG79eIr8MbkjYrCvcTR...
Except for that pharmacies already sell your prescription data to anyone who wants it.
Paragraph 2c https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fsC4/CA-medical
Seriously though, this is bad for privacy, bad for addicts, and bad for patients who need painkillers.
Who thinks of this shit? Aging drug warriors I suppose.
Oh yes they can; the very reason he's even retaining them is to have some plea-bargaining material.
It's extremely disheartening to find out about the Obama administration's position. There are so many problems in the country that urgently need to be addressed, but instead the DEA is mucking around in prescription records which deserve protection.
We should indeed raise a stink about this foul situation. Most of all it's time to abolish the worthless DEA.
In the US, I think having a crippling drug addiction is better than 14 felony counts. What's that? 30 years in prison? Life? No chance of gainful employment for life? Shit paid public defender, or $300,000 to fight it? I thought we were getting more sensible about this stuff?
Absurd. Write or email your congressman. It's the only thing that will do any good.
http://www.reuters.com/article/financial-un-drugs-idUSLP6507...
Unfortunately there are a lot of people who wouldn't drive to a seedy neighborhood and risk arrest to secure drugs, but who would take drugs if buying them were cheap and safe. Some number of those people will end up hooked, and some number of those people will be breaking into houses (or worse) looking for stuff to sell so they can get their next hit.
Like I said, I don't think the putting a stop to that is worth what we're paying in terms of money and lost freedoms, but let's not pretend these substances were made illegal out of groundless malice. If and when we end the drug war there will be more junkies, more crack whores, more people who sit around staring at the wall instead of working and raising families, more people in the ERs from overdoses and drug-fueled mental breakdowns. It's a price I think we should pay, but it still a price.
As for groundless malice...you're half-right. It wasn't groundless, it was and still is racist in origin.
Right now: "Then why is gay marriage illegal in Japan et al?"
Etc. Your point has nothing to do with the drug war itself, it's broad enough to apply to any early-stage progressive proposal.
You're dead wrong. And unless you intend malice you need to stop spreading this BS. Portugal legalized ALL drugs and a decade later they saw abuse fall by 50%. Source: http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal...
But almost all U.S. DEA prosecution is over trafficking, not possession. So decriminalization wouldn't get rid of it.
When they decriminalized all drugs of abuse, they saw an initial, mild spike in usage rates, and now consistently see far lower rates of drug abuse, for all drugs than pretty much every other country.
Pick a position, and argue it; when you're proven wrong, accept it and learn.
The point under discussion is the abolition of the DEA, meaning legalization of drugs. The DEA doesn't spend a lot of time running down drug users - this is about dealers.
Don't assume other people are moving goalposts because you didn't understand where they were to start with.
I'm not sure the same would be true in the US, seeing the piss-poor state of mental health treatment in the US.
In the US, offering treatment like that would probably be decried as welfare-state redistributory nonsense.
The evidence is, based on heroin use among white people, that nobody needs to drive to a "seedy" <cough>black</cough> neighborhood to get heroin.
And never mind driving! These people are using a needle drug which entails risk of hepatitis C, AIDS, etc. Is a lw goinf to deter them?
Yes the Drug War was created with malice. Just not "groundless." The grounds were to continue Jim Crow by other means. The Drug Warrors are an expensive evil.
The problem I have is that the US is so hard headed, they double down whenever something doesn't work rather than reevaluate. The US has been doubling down on the drug war every administration since the 1970s. The solution has been significantly more harmful than the problem since the 80s, and yet they keep doubling down. Sounds like we just doubled down again with painkillers. It's madness.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...
"John D. Rockefeller, a teetotaler, observed in 1932, 'drinking has generally increased, the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale.'"
To avoid a long drawn out argument about which statistics are more likely to be accurate, I'm willing to admit that both conclusions are possible and the actual answer lies somewhere in-between. The first guy estimated 30%, Rockefeller surmised that it increased, so lets go with 15% decrease in drug use because of the drug war. That's even hard to say because the drug war has lasted a lot longer than prohibition.
Unfortunately I couldn't quickly find any information about the repeal of prohibition which is more relevant to the topic since we are currently in a prohibition.
Anyway, I guess the country needs to decide if 15% increase in drug use is worth the cost of the drug war, so for every 20 current drug users, we'd get 3 more. In exchange, we'd get a lot of money in the treasury, respect for the law, return of our freedoms (maybe), much smaller incarceration rate, greatly weakened gangs and cartels, much less justification for surveillance, and an overall less hellishly scary police state.
Unfortunately, the US doesn't debate it rationally in those terms.
> Some number of those will end up hooked, and some number of those people will be breaking into houses (or worse) looking for stuff to sell so they can get their next hit.
But most folks won't do this stuff. Most folks won't even get addicted. It isn't like the US has affordable facilities to help folks, staffed with medical doctors and psychologists to help folks along. They do have AA and NA. A few are helped, many others aren't.
Some of the key with Portugal's decriminalization was they offered help to those addicted. Affordable help. Right now, you have people getting pills for surgery, etc. and some of them wind up addicted. Instead of the doctor being able to have an honest conversation with the person about warnings signs, etc, and offering free(!) help to those that wind up addicted, we choose to treat them like criminals.
>... let's not pretend these substances were made illegal out of groundless malice.
Only that isn't really true either. Some of the campaigns to make them illegal were based in racism. Misinformation was spread, both before and after. My grandmother thought pot would make people insane, for example. And research shows that most of these would have less effect on society than alcohol. There are drugs that I think are bad for folks that take them and their families, but we could actually help folks and their families instead. Punish for actual crimes instead of "a few of these folks could commit a crime".
That is absolutely true. I didn't say civilization will collapse or anything like that. I'm just saying there will be a price. There's certainly room for disagreement over how high the price will be. But I think it's pretty ridiculous to pretend ending drug prohibition will be free.
>Only that isn't really true either. Some of the campaigns to make them illegal were based in racism.
I don't find this compelling. Yes, there was a feeling of "Don't smoke pot - only jazz musicians smoke pot." But if you really thought only jazz musicians smoked pot there wouldn't be any reason to make it illegal. And if there were 88% of the country wouldn't tolerate prohibition just to oppress the other 12%.
>Misinformation was spread, both before and after. My grandmother thought pot would make people insane, for example.
Yes, that's true, though I think there's a big difference between marijuana and, say, opiods, amphetamines, or barbiturates.
>There are drugs that I think are bad for folks that take them and their families, but we could actually help folks and their families instead.
If you read up a bit you'll see I'm in basic agreement with you on the right way to move forward. I just think it's naive to believe people won't take more drugs in the margin, and we won't be dealing with some problems as a result. The hope (and my belief) is the new problems will be fewer than the old problems we're getting rid of by getting rid of drug laws.
And I say that as someone who has never taken an illegal drug nor drank alcohol, and I avoid prescription and OTC medication as much as possible (I believe in living healthy in all aspects, though I concede that certain drugs are unavoidable for some people, including me with my wonderful thyroid issues).
Health care in the US is already such a shit-show that I would seriously consider moving out of the country if I developed a serious condition requiring constant treatment. I certainly won't have any expensive procedures done here.
I was a bit nervous as this medicine can make your skin die and fall off (SJS), so I found a private dermatologist to go to just in case. Fortunately it's working fine for me. No more days spent moping in bed. And no official diagnostic that I'm not sane. Costs me about $2000 a year. Small price to pay to not be treated like a child and having my volition called into question.
How were they treated? Seems surprising to me, given how prevalent mood disorders are.
Up to a point, surely.
That's great in theory but not in practice. I would say to treat it with physical therapy if possible, rather than taking painkillers (as I posted elsewhere in this discussion, I avoid any drugs if possible, OTC or prescription) but sadly that's simply not the answer for everyone. There are some kinds of pain that no level of physical therapy can address, pain so debilitating it could make one suicidal.
I suffered that kind of pain when I was a teenager battling cancer, and I had no choice but to take the painkillers my doctor prescribed just to be able to function. I don't ever want to feel that kind of pain again, obviously, but I also don't ever want to take that kind of medicine again if I can help it. To this day I struggle with back pain left over from the bout with cancer (and I'm nearly 40), but I deal with it through exercise, posture, and willpower, rather than giving in to a cycle of addiction. I sympathize with people addicted to painkillers, and I wish there was an easy solution for everyone.
Related topic: I always get uneasy when law enforcement skirt around getting a warrant. Do we have any data showing that we're safer (e.g. accurate arrests are made more quickly) when law enforcement doesn't need a warrant?
And if the national government took the measures necessary to significantly reduce drug use, their resources would be cut off because voters wouldn't stand for the much heavier and pettier and more expensive police state tactics.
So the best bet for the government is burn vast amounts of money to randomly hurt random people without ever seeking any kind of improvement in the situation. More information doesn't affect that calculation.
I really can't tell, I thought it was no longer ok to refer to homosexuality as a disease. Is it ok now to treat "feeling like you are in the wrong sex" as a disease that can be treated?
Homosexuality is not consider an illness, and does not require treatment, in fact no treatment is known. OTOH GD is the distress an individual has when biological status is inconsistent with internal experience of the "correct" gender. It's an uncommon condition occurring at a population rate of about 0.005%, affecting more males than females.
Treatment of GD is available though complex. In most cases appropriate counseling is provided, and treatment possibly includes hormone and other medications, and reconstructive surgery.
I think the point is that it's your biological sex that's treated as "wrong" in this case, and treatment involves making it conform to how you feel.
It seems silly that this legal theory is so broad and convenient a tool that there is virtually no limitation on its powers to access information.
that is fucked on multiple levels. 14 counts? 14!
and all dropped because they were ridiculous to begin with. ugh.