Why does the Fed Govt keep a database of the prescription drugs we use? [View All]

[Oilwellian]

The expansion of the Surveillance State is endless. Buried within an ABC report on the Virginia Tech shootings is this paragraph (h/t reader DT):

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

Is there any good reason whatsoever why the federal government should be maintaining "files" which contain information about the pharmaceutical products which all Americans are consuming? The noxious idea has taken root in our country -- even before the Bush presidency, though certainly greatly bolstered during it -- that one of the functions of the federal government is to track the private lives of American citizens and maintain dossiers on what we do.

If that sounds hyperbolic, just review the disclosures over the course of recent years concerning what data bases the Federal Government has created and maintained and the vast amounts of data they contain -- everything from every domestic telephone call we make and receive to the content of our international calls to "risk assessment" records based on our travel activities to all sorts of information obtained by the FBI's use of NSLs. And none of that includes, obviously, the as-yet-undisclosed surveillance programs undertaken by the most secretive administration in history.

It is true that much (though not all) of this data is already scattered in the hands of various private corporations and insurance companies. But, for multiple and self-evident reasons, it presents a fundamentally different type and level of threat when it is all consolidated and centralized in the hands of the federal government. Amazingly, it is the political movement that spent all of the 1990s stridently warning of the dangers of federal government power -- The Black Helicopters And Janet Reno Are Coming -- which has brought us this Surveillance State and continues to cheer on its infinite expansion.

The federal government data base which contains all of our controlled substance prescriptions, for instance, was mandated by a law -- The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act -- passed in 2005 by the Republican-controlled Congress (though with full bipartisan support) and signed into law by the "conservative" Leader. That law appropriates funds to each state to create and maintain these data bases which are, apparently, accessible to federal agencies, federal law enforcement officials, and almost certainly thousands of other state and federal employees (as well as, most likely, employees of private companies).

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/18/surveillance/index.html