From the Des Moines Register comes another article that caught my eye:
John Grim is tired of staying quiet about his pain and the medicine he takes to control it. He’s fed up with the stigma surrounding the thousands of patients like him who use narcotics for legitimate reasons. And he’s outraged that state regulators want to set up a computer database that would track every prescription he fills.[...]
He has been following closely a proposal to have the Iowa Board of Pharmacy Examiners set up a computerized system, which would automatically track every order pharmacists fill for addictive medications. The idea was approved last spring by the Iowa House, but it bogged down in the Senate amid privacy concerns raised by doctors’ groups. Now the proposal is back before legislators after supporters altered it to address some of the complaints.
Under the revised plan, government officials could not perform random searches for patients who were buying unusually large amounts of drugs. Officials could look at the registry only if they could show “probable cause” to suspect that a specific person was doing something wrong. Supporters of the computer system say it mainly would be used by doctors and pharmacists, who could check it to see whether patients were duping multiple physicians into prescribing the same drugs.
This caught my eye because I’m familiar with a few folks with chronic pain issues, who have had to deal with the “joy” of having pharmacists refuse to fill scripts because they thought doctors were prescribing too much medicine, not to mention the pressures they face from family members ignorantly believing they’re just becoming drug addicts from their meds.
It’s perfectly understandable that someone in that situation would feel very sensitive towards a big government database being established to increase external scrutiny into their attempts to survive hellishness.
I’ll also take this opportunity to repeat soemthing I’ve said before — privacy rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution.