Contrarian reader Denis Falvey, a physician and retired Armed Forces Major, responds to our curmudgeonly friend's tale of abuse at the hands of the province's doctor and patient monitoring program prescription monitoring program: Your curmudgeonly friend is correct, on pretty much all points. The so-called war on drugs, like any war, is having serious consequences for innocent bystanders. And, like most wars, it has devolved into destructive nonsense. Drugs are illegal as a result of a misguided attempt to impose morality, back in the early 20th century. After a generation of murder and mayhem, alcohol prohibition was seen by virtually everyone to be...

23 August, 2012

A curmudgeonly friend writes: Last winter, the Nova Scotia Prescription Monitoring Program ruined my wife’s first vacation in eight years. The Program exists to restrain the abuse of prescription drugs, something I thought prescriptions themselves were for. To this end, among other things, the Program provides the police with information about legal (that is to say legal) drugs you are taking (you may have thought that information was confidential). But the hammer in the Program’s toolbox is its ability to intimidate doctors out of doing what they believe is right for their patients. To wit, from the Program’s FAQ: “If the Program has reason to believe...

22 August, 2012