Georgia Lawmaker Wants to Look in Your Medicine Cabinet

The war on drugs has been a miserable failure, with prohibition doing little more than boosting the black market profits that have helped fuel an increasingly violent drug trade. But politicians, notoriously willing to admit mistakes and adjust public policy accordingly, are beginning to acknowledge that failure.

Kidding!

As Georgia paper The Daily Citizen reports, state Rep. Tom Weldon thinks the problem isn't the war on drugs. No, it's his constituents' medical privacy – they have too much of it, you see. Thankfully, the Republican lawmaker has plan to fix that by, well, doing away with it.

“We don’t have a searchable database that sheriffs and law enforcement can go in and see who has been buying meth products and who has been buying an excessive amount of pills,” Weldon said during a recent meeting with a local chapter of the Chamber of Commerce. So he's proposing to create one – and to allow law enforcement to access it without so much as obtaining a warrant, something even his fellow drug warriors in the GOP question as perhaps a bit much.

But his intent isn't to eviscerate the rights of Georgia residents, of course: it's to protect the children.

“We’ve got a problem going up and down I-75, and our kids are being exposed to a lot of pharmaceutical drugs,” he said. “We need to limit that.”

What “we” also need to limit, apparently, is their parents' constitutionally recognized right to be protected against unreasonable searches without probable cause and a warrant, also known as the Fourth Amendment. Not that eliminating privacy and continually eroding U.S. citizens' rights has done much good so far.

As Reason magazine's criminal justice reporter Radley Balko points out, previous legislative efforts to combat the use of methamphetamines have backfired, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. While limits on the amount of cold medicine people can buy – and electronic databases that track who purchases them – was justified as a much-needed tool in the war on meth, use of the drug was up 34 percent in 2009.

The electronic tracking systems, meanwhile, only “invite more people into the criminal activity because the black market price of the product becomes so much more profitable,” Jason Grellner, a detective and former head of the Missouri Narcotics Officer Association, told the AP. Indeed, thanks to the purchasing restrictions, a $7 box of pills can sell for as much as $50 on the street. “Where else can you make a 750 percent profit in 45 minutes?”

If idiocy is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, well ... our legislatures are filled with a lot of idiots (is that really disputable?). Restricting the rights of Americans and expanding the power of police in the name of the war on drugs has been tried many times before. And it has failed to achieve anything but a massive expansion in state power and skyrocketing prison population that is now the largest in human history.

Rep. Weldon might have the best of intentions -- hey, anything's possible -- but his proposed legislation is just more of the same. Urge him to drop his proposal before lawmakers in other states get the same bad idea.

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Photo Credit: Mr. T in DC