Drug addicts always find a way. Like gun control, most drug laws do nothing but make life harder for law-abiding citizens.
Shutting down and prosecuting pill mills in Florida was an important achievement, and the law signed by Gov. Rick Scott in June 2011 helped put those drug pushers out of business.
But Scott originally opposed the bill because it established a prescription drug database that many conservatives believe would violate the public’s right to privacy, while making it harder for legitimate patients suffering real pain to receive proper medication.
In February 2009, as a blogger for the Sun Sentinel, I wrote:
The State of Florida should not have the right to track our private and legal relationships with our doctors.
As it is now, if you get your face caught in a blender and your leg eaten by a wood chipper, you’re lucky if the doctor tosses you a Tylenol after sewing you back together.
The bill is a bad idea that takes away more of our freedom without doing much to stop illegal drug use. Junkies are an ingenious bunch and they will figure out a way to beat the system or they will just switch to heroin or cocaine, both of which are widely available despite being illegal.
I bring this up now because of an article by Nicole Brochu of the Sun Sentinel, Heroin taking oxy’s place for more addicts.
Turns out, I was right. Now that pain pills are harder to get, addicts have switched to heroin.
Meanwhile, the drug database was established, despite Scott’s initial opposition, taking more of our freedoms and privacy away, since anyone with a doctor’s script for meds went into the system.
But not the junkies. They switched to heroin and left us holding the bag.
About Jack Furnari
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“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Ben Franklin had it right, sadly Republicans in Tallahassee and DC have been swept up into thinking their job is absolute security at the expense of personal liberty. As Jack points out, these attempts to make us safe, actually backfire and make things worse. An example is the REAL ID Act by George W. Bush and enacted here in Florida. We are now forced to provide private documents to be scanned into a database just to renew our driver’s license. Otherwise, we must prove who we are and have our paperwork ready at all times to be an “approved” citizen. Analysis has shown that the REAL ID will not prevent a terrorist attack, but forces innocent citizens to be followed and tracked. “I’ll be watching you” is a great song by the recording artist Sting, but does not make for good public policy.
Little by little we are losing any privacy that we had, between the government ( under the guise of protecting us) or the internet we have absolutely no way of keeping our personal information private. It is too late.
As a chronic back pain, patient ( three major back surgeries that has left me in more pain, due to nerve damage and scar tissue) I’ve been having a lot of trouble filling my prescriptions because the pharmacy’s have trouble getting the meds in with all the new regulations! On top of this, I find out that I’ve been forced to give all private information to the government! This is wrong!
VERY GOOD POINTS MADE HERE. tHERE IS A DOWNSIDE TO THIS LAW — LEGITAMATE PEOPLE NEEDING THESE MEDS HAVE A HARD TIME GETTING THEM (LIKE kATHY J ABOVE) OR HAVING PAINFUL DELAYS BECAUSE NOW PHARMACIES HAVE TO CONTACT YOUR DOC EVEN WITH A PERSCIPTION.
LMFAO Thanks!
It’s our own fault. We allowed them to begin this with the cold medicines. Now in order to get 12 hour Sudafed or its generic you have to be treated like a criminal. You cannot build up a supply by getting a box from multiple stores because they track your purchases. Too bad if you have 3 people sick. What did the people do that buy these pills? They switched to other pills knows as “red hots”. It doesn’t matter what you try to limit, there will always be a way around it. For some reason, people just didn’t learn this lesson from prohibition. Control of most things is just an illusion and usually a front for just simple straight forward control of people.
The more years we’ve spent on the Earth (aka the older we are), the more we feel the pain of our rights being taken away. It’s been done gradually, but it’s been continual. What we used to fear for those who lived in the U.S.S.R., we begin to see taking place in this country. For instance, imagine being arrested for saying something as simple as wanting to see a politician dead. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? You’ve been “taught” to think so. We’ve been indoctrinated in the last fifty years to think it’s normal to arrest someone for such a deed. I remember when we used to be aghast that those who lived behind the Iron Curtain would be imprisoned for just saying something so simple.
The question is, how do we keep our politicians from breaking down our freedom? Neither party is immune.
Jack, I had the unique opportunity to live, for months at a time, behind the Iron Curtain. Twice, I spent time in the former East Germany, in the 70′s and 80′s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I experienced the most closed and monitored society on earth. My I.D. and passport were confiscated for weeks… with no explanation. Stasi (DDR gov’t.informers) “betreuer,” or helpers, followed foreigners, including myself, everywhere. My room was broken into, bugged and my electronics disassembled. While there, I became ill and partook of their “free” health care…with personal information going into my still archived Berlin file! I can see with clarity the changes in our system of governance, the loss of freedoms, the increasing demand for personal information and endless bureaucratic paperwork.. The last time I saw my rheumatologist of the last ten years, he apologetically asked me to provide a urine sample! He shook his head and said, “It’s a new law.” I never thought it would come to this. And the younger generation probably thinks this is “normal.”