Thursday, January 07, 2010

Wow, Nanny-State Minnesota takes a step forward, Comrades,

For Your Own Good!
...the state will now know when any of us get prescribed Vicodin, Oxycontin, or any other potentially addictive medicines. Minnesota will require pharmacies to report every customer who fills such a prescription to the Minnesota Prescription Monitoring Program, starting next Monday. The state says this will allow doctors to know whether their patients are abusing prescription medication by seeing more than one doctor, but they won’t be the only ones:

Starting this week, Minnesota residents who fill prescriptions for addictive drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin are going into a new state database.

The aim is to stop drug abusers and dealers from shopping around for prescriptions.

Pharmacies were required to start reporting to the Minnesota Prescription Monitoring Program on Monday. By March, doctors, dentists and pharmacists can use the system to identify patients who get too many habit-forming medicines.

So the state will have a list of everyone who has prescribed painkillers. What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah, what problems could possibly follow along with this? Ignoring, of course, the basic one of the government stepping deeper into your life.

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