The Dangers of Federal Snooping into Our Prescription Drug Records

Former Reason man Radley Balko from his new perch at
the Washington Post points out the
dangers of prescription drug user databases, especially when
government agencies get access to them without court order.

After discussing a recent legal challenge to the practice in
Oregon, and how Pennsylvania is trying to create more
records of its citizens prescription drug use for government snoops
to enjoy:

Imagine a law enforcement officer looking for ammunition in a
divorce or custody dispute. Or perhaps a politician who takes the
wrong position on police pensions or police accountability might
see his painkiller scripts leaked to the press. (That sort of
retaliation wouldn’t
be unheard of.) Moraff points out that Virginia’s prescription
database has already been accessed by hackers, who then threatened
to release the records of 8 million people.

But [there’s a] less obvious problem—the chilling effect this
will have on doctors. For example, one of the red flags federal
investigators look for when looking for doctors to accuse of “drug
dealing” is the overall number of prescriptions a given doctor
writes for various controlled drugs. That means that as he’s
deciding your course of treatment, or whether to prescribe opioids
to improve your mother’s quality of life as she’s dying from
terminal cancer, he’ll be thinking about how many scripts for those
drugs he may have already written for other patients. It’s an
intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship, and could influence a
doctor’s decisions about a patient’s treatment with factors that
have nothing to do what’s best for that particular patient.

Jacob Sullum’s 1997 classic on the unconscionable war on pain
meds needs to
be read and re-read.

Previous Reason writings
on ‘scrip drug databases.