Snooping in Your Medicine Cabinet

Jacob Sullum | October 19, 2004

The Senate is considering a bill that would encourage every state to create an electronic monitoring program for prescription drugs, with information shared among states and between states and the federal government. The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2004 (NASPER), already approved by the House on a voice vote, is aimed at creating a national system in which the government is constantly looking over doctors' shoulders as they write prescriptions, looking for signs of nonmedical use. Such a system would magnify the chilling effect that the government's second-guessing has on pain treatment while sacrificing patient privacy for the sake of the war on drugs.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a physician, calls NASPER, a.k.a. HR 3015, "yet another unjustifiable attempt by the federal government to use the war on drugs as an excuse for invading the privacy and liberties of the American people and for expanding the federal government's disastrous micromanagement of medical care." He argues that the bill violates the Fourth Amendment, since it "authorizes the use and disclosure of identifiable health information for law enforcement purposes without the patient's knowledge or consent, without probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and without obtaining a search warrant."

Comments

|10.19.04 @ 11:02AM|#

If crack cocaine were dispensed by prescription then we could use this new system to fight voter fraud! ;)

|10.19.04 @ 11:02AM|#

Thanks for posting this. I will contact my ultra-liberal representative and tell him how I feel about this. He will likely give me the finger and vote for it anyway, if his other responses to me are any indication.

|10.19.04 @ 11:21AM|#

I wonder if we can get Ron Paul in the White House on a write in?

Come on everybody! There's got to be upwards of 20-30 people on this site! You CAN make a difference!

|10.19.04 @ 11:22AM|#

John,

It says "already approved by the House on a voice vote"
I thought the house was run by the repubs, the conservatives?


Actually, it all goes to show how both the far right and the far left like nothing less than our liberty and rights.

|10.19.04 @ 11:24AM|#

I'm sure this will bring prescription drug costs down.

|10.19.04 @ 11:27AM|#

With all the government reorganizations recently: homeland security, intellegence gathering, I'm thinking, while we're on a roll, we consolidate everything spooky under one cabinet secretary:
alcohol, tobacco, guns, drugs, atheists, anarchists, telekenesis.

|10.19.04 @ 11:45AM|#

That sounds like the Department of Fun to me, Ruthless. All my favorite things (well, maybe not anarchists) under one roof!

|10.19.04 @ 12:05PM|#

Good ol' Ron Paul. You'd think there would be room in Congress for a few more limited government supporters, wouldn't you? If we ever end up losing the protections of the Constitution, it won't be because someone "suspends" it. It'll be because the terms of the document will have become completely ignored and irrelevant.

Must leave. Feel rant coming. . . .

|10.19.04 @ 7:05PM|#

Pro -

Pretty much like it already is, eh?

|10.20.04 @ 5:24AM|#

What is this "Fourth Amendment" Mr. Paul speaks of? He seems to imply that it has some magical power of restraining the government from doing whatever it likes, and we all know that that's wrong; if the government, in its all-seeing wisdom, couldn't do whatsoever it pleased, how could it do its job of keeping us absolutely safe from anything that could possibly ever hurt us? Mr. Paul is obviously a drug-user, to be hallucinating so, and should be investigated post haste.