Two years ago, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush expanded the mandate of a special session of the legislature to include consideration of a bill creating a state database to track the pharmaceutical purchases of Florida consumers. The effort failed, but now state Sen. Mike Fasano has resurrected the idea in a bill currently pending.

According to the Miami Herald, "Under the proposal, a doctor would be required to submit data to the Florida Department of Health concerning a patient, his prescription and the amount. When the prescription was filled, the pharmacist would be supposed to transmit the information within 35 days, by either e-mail or regular mail."

The new database would be funded by $2 million extracted from Purdue Pharma in a deal made when the state agreed to lay off an investigation of its marketing practices, reported the Orlando Sentinel. The 2002 bill would have started up the database with a certain list of prescription drugs that supposedly are commonly abused. But the 2004 legislation would include all drugs classed as Schedule II, III, or IV by the FDA. This encompasses virtually all but a handful of commonly prescribed drugs.

Angling for co-villain status this year is House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, who had been instrumental in blocking the prescription database plans in the past, but now has changed his mind, perhaps due to the publicity given Rush Limbaugh's OxyContin woes. The $2 million from the OxyContin manufacturers will of course only last so long, after which ordinairy taxpayers will be picking up the tab for this dubious program. As the Florida "drug czar" pointed out to the Herald, transactions like those Limbaugh allegedly made from "illegal pill mills" for stolen or imported pills won't go into the database. But the records of patients and doctors operating under the increasingly capricious law would be up for scrutiny.

All this provides easy one-stop shopping for stalkers, nosy coworkers, bitter ex-spouses, corrupt cops and the like. Sensitive medical information about hundreds of thousands of Floridians is only a hack or a bribe away.

Is giving the Nanny State the keys to our medicine cabinet really going to wipe out prescription drug abuse? Of course not. Bureaucrats and cops are no substitute for the support of family, faith and friends in fighting such problems. But that is of no consequence from Privacy Villains like Fasano who would sacrifice medical privacy to make points on the hot news stories of the day.

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