Doctors Group Fights Prescription Reporting Bill
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/11/21/152043.shtmlMonday, Nov. 22, 2004
The Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS) is warning all who will listen that “Big Brother will be soon snooping around your medicine cabinet!”
The Arizona-based association has come out strongly against the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act. Already passed by the House, it is working its way through the Senate.
“Do you want the government to have a record of every prescription you get?” asks the association in its campaign of flyers and e-mails reaching out to physicians and their patients around the country.
“Every painkiller? Every anti-depressant? Every sleeping pill? And then to pass that information along to law enforcement to prosecute you and your doctor if they don’t like what they find?”
AAPS is arguing that while masquerading as a law enforcement tool to help control the illegal use of painkillers, the national bill would “cast a net so wide that tens of millions of suffering patients & doctors will be snared in suspicion.”
Not limited to prescriptions for painkillers, AAPS adds, the bill would create a central database affecting tens of millions who are not even suspected of a crime -- and the information will be shared with state and local law enforcement.
“Prosecutors and law enforcement already second-guess doctors and prosecute them for prescribing ‘too much’ or if they decide the patient doesn’t ‘deserve’ treatment,” a spokesperson for AAPS told NewsMax.
“Overzealous prosecutors have already frightened many doctors out of prescribing pain treatment for the almost 50 million patients who suffer from pain,” the spokesperson added. “We can’t let them do it to the rest of us as well.”
In its current campaign the organization highlights:
The National All Schedules Prescription Reporting Act allows government and law enforcement to monitor your prescriptions;
Treats tens of millions of patients as potential criminals;
Gives prosecutors & law enforcement power to decide who is “deserving” of medicines.
AAPS emphasizes that in its opinion the bill as presently worded would potentially target every prescription that involves any type of scheduled drug for anxiety, depression, insomnia, or pain – “making the suspect doctors’ scripts readily accessible to the police and potentially to employers, newspapers, and blackmailers.”
Kathryn Serkes, public affairs counsel for AAPS, pointed out that more than 48 million people who suffer chronic pain in the United States are "having difficulty finding doctors to treat them as a result of misguided drug policy, law enforcement, and overzealous prosecutions.
“The ‘war on drugs’ has turned into a war on doctors and the legal drugs they prescribe and the suffering patients who need the drugs to attempt anything approaching a normal life,” added Serkes.
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