That dark underbelly of our famously progressive state I recently wrote about is showing in other places, too:

Green Mountain Daily:: BREAKING: State Police Reportedly Collecting Pharmacy Records Across Vermont
GMD has learned that State Police representatives are going to Vermont Pharmacies and demanding complete dumps of all information about patients with Schedule II prescriptions (the class of medications that include prescription drugs with street value). After talking to a few pharmacists, I found one in Franklin County that confirmed they had been approached, and had been advised by the state that they did, indeed need to comply with the request. Needless to say, he wasn’t too happy about it.

The story has been picked up by Daily Kos and Huffington Post, which I think is a good thing. Perhaps mainstream media will pick it up eventually. This particular story addresses 4th Amendment rights to protection against unreasonable search and seizure, whereas the instances I pointed to previously were related to 5th Amendment guarantees of due process.

Attention to Constitutional violations in Vermont is important precisely because this is the most politically progressive state in the nation, and if these things are happening out in the open here, one can figure they are going on pretty much everywhere. They may cluster more around one type of violation or another depending on a particular jurisdiction’s character, but civil liberties have been wounded everywhere. They haven’t been just eroded, they’ve been eviscerated.

The patient’s not dead yet, though, and we still have time to reverse course and establish basic civil liberties more clearly than ever. Kudos to Green Mountain Daily for shining the light in this dark corner.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen