Obama’s DEA wants your private medical records without a warrant
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It would appear that the Feds are working towards getting a look at millions of private files without a warrant, including those of two transgender men who are taking testosterone. In other words, you can take legal prescription drugs, prescribed to you by a doctor and then you can be arrested for it. Marlon Jones was arrested for taking legal painkillers, prescribed to him by a doctor, after a double knee replacement. Jones, an assistant fire chief of Utah’s Unified Fire Authority, was snared in a dragnet pulled through the state’s program to monitor prescription drugs after someone stole morphine from an ambulance in 2012. To find the missing morphine, cops used their unrestricted access to the state’s Prescription Drug Monitor Program database to look at the private medical records of nearly 500 emergency services personnel—without a warrant. The police chief informed him that they thought he was taking too many drugs and they needed to ensure he was not a threat… that it was for his own good. He was arrested in front of his wife and daughter and in full view of the neighbors. He was charged with 14 felony counts that were later dropped. I hope he sues the hell out of them.
From The Daily Beast:
Now the Drug Enforcement Administration wants that same kind of power, starting with access to an Oregon database containing the private medical data of more than a million people.
The DEA has claimed for years that under federal law it has the authority to access the state’s Prescription Drug Monitor Program database 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.
In 2012 Oregon sued the DEA to prevent it from enforcing the subpoenas to snoop around its drug registry. Two years ago a U.S. District Court found in favor of the state, ruling that prescription data is covered by the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unlawful search and seizure.
But the DEA didn’t stop there. It appealed the ruling to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and has been fighting tooth and nail ever since to access Oregon’s files on its own terms.
This is the Obama administration going against the state of Oregon and five individual plaintiffs, two of whom are transgender and take prescription hormone drugs that are covered by Oregon’s prescription monitoring law. In his 2014 ruling against the DEA, District Court Judge Ancer L. Haggerty called warrantless searches of such data an egregious invasion of privacy. And they are. “Although there is not an absolute right to privacy in prescription information… it is more than reasonable for patients to believe that law enforcement agencies will not have unfettered access to their records,” the judge added. 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. This is Obama and his Feds taking the step to illegally obtain our medical records and breach our medical privacy. The primary purpose of PDMPs should be for healthcare, not law enforcement.
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