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DEA Wants Access To Medical Records Without Warrant (thedailybeast.com)
mi writes from a report via The Daily Beast: Unlike in cases of commercially-held data, where the Third Party doctrine allows police warrantless access, prescription drug monitoring databases are maintained by state-governments. The difference is lost to the Obama Administration, which argues that "since the records have already been submitted to a third party (a state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program) that patients no longer enjoy an expectation of privacy." The DEA has claimed for years that under federal law it has the authority to access the states' prescription drug databases using only an "administrative subpoena." These are unilaterally issued orders that do not require a showing of probable cause before a court, like what's required to obtain a warrant. Some states, like Oregon, fight it; some, like Wisconsin, do not. "The federal government is eager to see all these databases linked," reports The Daily Beast. "The Department of Justice has developed a software platform to facilitate sharing among all state PDMPs. So far 32 states already share their PDMP data through a National Association of Boards of Pharmacy program. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), which passed Congress in March, calls for expanding sharing of PDMP data."
... then FBI, then DEA ...
The system rots, from within
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
As a Obama supporter (twice), can I just say:
Dude... Obama... stop. The tin foil hat brigade is giving me that knowing nod of "see? We fucking told you", and I have no reasonable retort. The Constitution was supposed to be your wheelhouse.
Fuck them forever. Fuck them from day one. Fuck anyone who works for them. Fuck anyone who supports them. Fuck any country that employs them. Lastly...FUCK THE DEA
What is with all these requests for data without a warrant? If they have a legitimate request for access, it will be very easy for them to get a warrant. The only reason I can think of to want warrantless access is to circumvent constitutional protections.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
FTFA: 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.
How do *I* lose my rights if a second party turns over info to a third party?
Now I see why the Obama administration has had such a hardon for electronic medical records.
HIPAA was written specifically to ensure that medical records are not passed around without the patient's consent.
Based on my conversations with lawyers, I would say that the HIPAA laws were written specifically to ensure that hospitals could disclose medical records to law enforcement without incurring any liability.
When politicians want to do something particularly outrageous, they use Orwellian language. They call it the "Privacy Rule" because it takes away your privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person.
If you want something to be private and confidential, don't let it go in your medical record.
A lawyer once told me that a medical record is a "public document." It's accessable to everyone with a "need to know," and that includes the janitor who mops up your room and is concerned about infections.
If for no other reason than privacy, this is why a cashless society is totally undesirable if you value privacy. Literally every transaction you do is visible by or through a third party to the transaction. Therefore the third party doctrine would apply to your entire economic life.
And you know that if we get there, no one in Congress is going to propose, let alone get passed, a bill that formally abolishes that doctrine and requires a warrant for every data request.
The government can't (or should not) pass a law that requires collection of data, then claim that people have no expectation of privacy in that data.
What if the government passed a law requiring you to upload the contents of your computer to a massive database, then decided that it didn't need a warrant to access that same data?
If the Supreme Court allows this, it shows that the justices are themselves corrupt.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I would recommend that you never tell your doctor that you use marijuana.
That will usually go into your medical record, because it's part of your medical and social history.
Now with electronic medical records, anybody with access can do a text search for "marijuana" and find it.
The most obvious problem that I can identify is that years later, you might have a legitimate need for opioids.
For example, hip and knee replacements are very painful. In order to be successful, they require physical therapy, which is also very painful, and often can't be done right without opioids. (See Jane Brody's story in the New York Times about her own knee replacements.)
If your medical record mentions marijuana, that can set off some (unscientific) guidelines for using opioids, which require that you sign a "pain contract." You have to take (unnecessary and expensive) drug tests, with (unnecessary and expensive) doctors' visits, with lower doses than would be medically appropriate, and they can discontinue opioids if you test positive for marijuana. Normally it would be a violation of medical ethics to abandon a patient, but these pain contracts allow doctors to unethically abandon a patient if they violate some of these provisions.
The Veterans Administration just backed off on one of those pain contracts after a veteran sued them. But not everybody can afford a lawyer.
http://journalofethics.ama-ass...
Veterans Health Administration Policy on Cannabis as an Adjunct to Pain Treatment with Opiates
Michael Krawitz
AMA Journal of Ethics.
June 2015, 17(6):558-561.
If a doctor specifically asks about marijuana, I think a good answer would be, "You can't guarantee me that this information will be confidential, right?"
Because there were about 30,000 deaths a year recently from opioids in the US.
This widely-reported number deliberately confuses
--people who take heroin to get high
--people who take prescription drugs without a prescription to get high
-- people who were appropriately prescribed opioids and died anyway
-- people who were appropriately prescribed opioids but given doses that were too low and got additional drugs somewhere
-- people who were prescribed opioids but couldn't afford them so they used cheaper heroin, etc.
It is a legitimate problem, but the Drug Enforcement Agency runs things and their solution to all problems is to put people in prison. When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
You could get a rational discussion of the problem in those silly European magazines like Lancet, BMJ or New Scientist. Unfortunately some of the Europeans are following the American example of stupidity.
Let the addicts have their favored poison, and quietly remove themselves from the gene pool.
I would rather we had a drug problem than suffer the continuing existence of the DEA. Oh, wait - we still do have a drug problem as well as a DEA. And when the agency goes, can we have back the parts of the Constitution that we deleted for their benefit?
The entire idea that the DEA would remove the drug "problem" is laughable on the face of it. Their existence is predicated on the problem continuing to exist.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Drug addict: You mean if I come forward as a drug addict and try to get clean, they're going to arrest me and charge me with a crime? Forget that... I'll just put up with the addiction and try to keep it as quiet as possible.