The plaintiffs in the case, four patients and one physician affected by the subpoenas, had claimed their Fourth Amendment rights had been violated as their information had been obtained without a warrant or other court order.
The DEA then asserted patients have no reasonable expectation to privacy when their records are sent to a third party, such as a pharmacy, and maintains medical information does not enjoy the same privacy protection as medical records. The DEA cited a recent Supreme Court decision about a similar case: “The holding in [Whalen v. Roe] was that the New York law did not violate any constitutional rights of the patient whose prescriptions were revealed to the government.”
“Here, Plaintiffs-Intervenors do not have a constitutionally protected Fourth Amendment right in their prescription information. Accordingly, DEA is not required to obtain a judicial warrant based on probable cause before issuing an administrative subpoena for information collected by [the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program],” according to the DEA’s argument.
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