In a recent lawsuit against Walgreens for their Pharmacists filling Rxs that the DEA claimed demonstrated RED FLAGS were being ignored https://www.pharmaciststeve.com/walgreens-priority-was-filling-drug-orders-fast-judge-told/
Catizone, who served as the executive director and CEO of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy from 1988 to 2020, also submitted a 35-page declaration to the court. live testimony was given Thursday from Carmen Catizone, who said Walgreens did not meet the standard of care legally required of pharmacies. Among concerns, from 2003 to 2012, Walgreens had a policy passed on to pharmacists to merely call the doctor who issued a questionable prescription as opposed to doing any other due diligence. During cross-examination, Swanson took aim at the list of “red flags” or warning signs that suggest opioid abuse or diversion that Catizone said pharmacists are required to be on the lookout for.
“You don’t cite any federal or state statute that discloses each of these specific red flags you identify, do you?” Swanson asked, later noting that they also don’t appear in the Controlled Substances Act.
Does this suggest that the DEA is using RED FLAGS that does not exist in the Controlled Substance Act as part of their ALLEGATIONS that the practitioner, vendor (Pharmacy/Wholesaler) have violated the Controlled substance act. If RED FLAGS are unconstitutional involving the confiscating of guns, should they be EQUALLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL in using them in ALLEGATIONS that DEA license/permit holders have violated the Controlled Substance Act ? What I have seen is that the DEA has observed what addicts, abusers, diverters have done over the years, certain combinations of meds that they had abused- disregarding the very large doses they were taking or other substances legal/illegal taken concurrently, paying cash for Rxs, traveling long distances to see prescriber or pharmacy to fill Rxs and coming to the conclusion – particularly with combo of meds legally prescribed and within recommended doses – that anyone being prescribed these meds – must be a diverter, abuser, addict… because that is what they casually observed being done by addicts, abusers, diverters.
I have heard numerous attorneys state that those people who are taken to FEDERAL COURT – that 90%+ ARE FOUND GUILTY… With DEA/DOJ/FBI, is it all that they have to do in Federal Court to find a healthcare practitioner/vendor “guilty” is to produce some ALLEGATIONS, based on some “unconstitutional opinions” and NO REAL FACTS ? By getting a conviction of a practitioner on such unconstitutional “RED FLAGS”… could that be considered the confiscation of all the medical records of the chronic pain pts of the practice pain therapy, especially when the DEA ..that many have claimed that the DEA refused, declined, stalled off the pts getting copies of their medical records … making them having little/no chance of getting into another practice and getting their pain management reinstated ? Intentionally throwing all those hundred or thousands of pts into cold turkey withdrawal and at risk of premature death and or forced into using the only option that they have to end their unrelenting torturous level of pain – SUICIDE ?
Breaking: Supreme Court Rules ‘Red Flag’ Gun Laws Unconstitutional
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that warrantless gun confiscation from Americans’ homes is unconstitutional, voting unanimously on the side of a Rhode Island man whose firearms were taken by law enforcement without a warrant after his wife expressed concerns that he might hurt himself.
According to Caniglia v Strom, a lower court had previously determined that police confiscating the guns without a warrant fell under the Fourth Amendment’s “community care taking” exception, but a 9-0 vote from the nation’s top court struck down that ruling.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the unanimous opinion for the Supreme Court, stating that law enforcement can execute “many civic tasks in modern society,” but there is “not an open-ended license to perform them anywhere.”
“The very core of the Fourth Amendment,” Thomas wrote, is the “right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable search and seizure.”
Some exceptions to the 4th Amendment do exist, including “exigent circumstances,” Forbes reported. For instance, if an officer sees an individual about to shoot another person through the window of a home, that officer has the right to enter the home to prevent the attack.
Another exception – the one on which this case was based – is called “community care taking.” The Supreme Court previously determined that police can bypass the warrant requirement to perform “community care taking functions, totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute,” noting a situation when police took a gun from the trunk of an impounded vehicle without a warrant.
“In reaching this conclusion, the Court noted that the officers who patrol the ‘public highways’ are often called to discharge noncriminal ‘community care taking functions,’ such as responding to disabled vehicles or investigating accidents. But searches of vehicles and homes are constitutionally different, as the Cady opinion repeatedly stressed,” Thomas wrote in the court’s opinion.
In the case, Mr. Caniglia and his wife were arguing when he put an unloaded gun on their table and said, “shoot me now and get it over with.” Following the argument, Caniglia’s wife called the non-emergency police line, leading to a visit from law enforcement. The police convinced Mr. Caniglia to go to the hospital for psychological evaluation, despite disagreeing that his behavior was “abnormal” or “agitated.”
While Mr. Caniglia was on his way to the hospital, his wife told the police that he had two pistols in the home, at which point the officers searched the home without a warrant; however, Mrs. Caniglia couldn’t provide legal consent because the police lied, telling her that Mr. Caniglia had consented to the seizure of his firearms.
The officers subsequently located and confiscated the two handguns, prompting Mr. Caniglia to sue the police for allegedly violating his 4th Amendment rights.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion for the ruling in which he addressed existing “red flag” laws that also call into question Fourth Amendment rights.
“This case also implicates another body of law that petitioner glossed over: the so-called “red flag” laws that some States are now enacting. These laws enable the police to seize guns pursuant to a court order to prevent their use for suicide or the infliction of harm on innocent persons,” Alito wrote.
“They typically specify the standard that must be met and the procedures that must be followed before firearms may be seized,” he continued. “Provisions of red flag laws may be challenged under the Fourth Amendment, and those cases may come before us. Our decision today does not address those issues.”
In March, the Biden administration urged the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court’s ruling, arguing the actions taken by law enforcement to confiscate the petitioner’s firearms without a warrant were “reasonable.”
“The touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness,” the DOJ’s brief stated. “For criminal investigations, this Court has generally incorporated the Warrant Clause into the Fourth Amendment’s overarching reasonableness requirement, but it has not generally done so for searches or seizures objectively premised on justifications other than the investigation of wrongdoing.”
“The ultimate question in this case is therefore not whether the respondent officers’ actions fit within some narrow warrant exception, but instead whether those actions were reasonable. And under all the circumstances here, they were,” the brief added.
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