Effect is huge, and does seemingly everything, but it probably does the specific thing you want to do now, with the ability to extend to the other stuff as you need/want

... “transubstantiation” refers to a change in which the substance of a thing—what it really is—changes, while its physical characteristics do not. Of course, this sort of change only occurs in the Eucharist, which, though it appears to remain bread and wine throughout the Mass, nevertheless truly becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus.

I think this is a difference in language expectations, because when and where I grew up, some Protestants thought that Catholics believed either that the physical characteristics of the Eucharist changed during the blessing or consumption of the Eucharist, which your link seems to demonstrate to me that you are not agreeing with.

I was raised a Catholic, I believe doctrine changed at some time, maybe Vatican II? I remember being told as a child (a long time ago :) not to eat some time before communion.

Maybe that's obsolete now.

The Lutherans would like a word.

Are we discussing legality, morality, what should be legal, or what should be moral? I agree that would be bad morally, and shouldn't be legal, and currently isn't. My original comment was regarding how the process currently works, and why. It was also to explain that any concern of privacy regarding prescriptions comes more from the department of health/board of pharmacies than it does from 3rd partys providing documents, as the documents arent invading privacy anymore than what already happens.

> The states should keep their noses out of this and in effect all drugs should be made legal.

The whole "your right to swing your fist ends where someones face begins" thing applies here. The problem with some heavier drugs, and their addictive nature, comes in how it effects others. When something is so addictive that a person would sell their own child to acquire more of it, maybe we should limit access to that thing. Ive known a lot of addicts professionally and personally. They come in various degrees of wanting help. Some are in denial, some would do anything to kick the addiction. Some don't care at all and would fight to refuse any help under any circumstance. Its a super complicated issue, "Just legalize all of it", and "Just criminalize and punish all of it" are both equally shortsighted solutions.

> we should make it trivially easy to get help I agree 100%

> it should be trivially easy for a pharmacy to check if a doctor did indeed prescribe something without raping the privacy of everyone involved

It is, and they do. They call the doctor, he says "I didnt write this". Then he gives me a list of people who filled prescriptions he didnt write. The biggest invasion of privacy of unaffected people is when we have a confirmed suspect, we see what other doctors he filled a prescription for, and then go through that list with the new doctor to see what is and isnt legit.

So yeah, at some point in a table of a few hundred people I probably saw some names of people who were a doctors patient, and that they have a prescription from him. I've been inside their privacy just as much as the receptionist at the doctor's office and the pharmacy tech at the CVS

Nope. Invading privacy is invading privacy. Just because something is happening today does not make it okay and acceptable

> call the doctor

Is this the 70s? Call the doctor? Do you call the doctor for every prescription?

Here is a wild idea: we have tjis thing called the internet and this other wild thing called PKI. Give the doctor a certificate pair and they digitally sign every prescription. You don't ever need to talk to the doctor, you just need to pull their public certs.

Since we're doing privacy, give the chumps that need the prescription a cert pair and encrypt their shit + make it a crime to store any of their PII at pharmacy level.

Without it being an even worse situation where they get a Trojan from opening random emails or surfing for porn, and then all the sudden 100k valid appearing prescriptions for controlled medications all the sudden show up in pharmacies across the country?

Thats not what I was trying to say. My point was that the state already has this data, and I've already seen it before I get a copy of the data from the pharmacy. If you're concerned about the privacy of the data, you should consider the root issue of warrantless access to the PMP by investigators. Anything I get from the pharmacy is just a piece of paper that says the same thing that I already had from that

> Here is a wild idea: we have tjis thing called the internet and this other wild thing called PKI. Give the doctor a certificate pair and they digitally sign every prescription. You don't ever need to talk to the doctor, you just need to pull their public certs.

This is a great idea in theory, but currently has some problems. Some of them probably could and should be addressed, some not.

- Old people who dont want to learn. The PMP lets doctors get a list of every prescription filled in their name in a spreadsheet. You can sort and filter by where it was filled, patient name, type of medication, etc. Of the doctors Ive dealt with, maybe 10% knew about this and used it. A few learned about it from me, got excited, figured it out, and used it to its fullest extent. Most just went "yeah okay" and ignored it because spreadsheets are too complicated.

- Where are we storing this? Can only the doctor do it? From only one computer? Can his receptionist call in the prescription? Can anyone else access that computer? Basically is there any way at all for fraud to happen? What if its the doctor whos the one doing it? Ive seen pharmacists say "Were getting a lot of suspicious prescriptons from this one doctor" who was just flat out selling them to people who had no problems. E-scripts are a thing, and ive seen cases where nurses and receptionists hop onto the system to write illegal scripts.

> Since we're doing privacy, give the chumps that need the prescription a cert pair and encrypt their shit

My mom thinks opening chrome dev tools is going to get her arrested for hacking a website. Please dont put the onus of key pair encryption on her in any way

> + make it a crime to store any of their PII at pharmacy level Im not sure if its a legal/regulatory requirement, or just a moral thing, but Pharmacists are highly trained, with a Doctorate in what they do, and they catch things. Whether its a Doctor wrote the wrong script, or a potentially lethal contraindication between meds. Them having records of what else a person is on is a legitimate medical use case. There may be ways to keep this sort of data without PII, but it would be another concern to address.

The biggest thing we covered was prescription fraud. People stealing or forging doctor's prescriptions. Some were more subtle about it. Sometimes you'd see a patient filling a 30mg Oxycodone, 90 count.

Leads would come from either the Doctor, or the pharmacy. 30mg Oxycodone/90 is generally a "You are in massive pain and probably dying" prescription. So when a health 20 something year old walks in and has it filled for themself, it raises some eyebrows. They'd either call the Doctor to verify, who'd call us to investigate, or theyd call us and then we'd call the doctor.

But the state already has access to this information. All prescriptions are logged in the Prescription Monitoring Program, which I believe all states how now. Any Doctor can get a spreadsheet of all prescriptions filled in their name over the last N days, who it was prescribed to, what for, and when. It was an invaluable tool. Doctor Adams tells us he never wrote this prescription for Bill. We lookup Bill and see he has filled similar suspicious prescriptions from Doctor Charles and Doctor Daniels. We talk to Charles and Daniels and they tell us that Bill isnt their patient either. We encourage Charles and Daniels to check their PMP report, and they uncover 4 or 5 more suspicious prescriptions, and we just keep pulling at this thread uncovering more and more.

Of course there is potential for abuse and neglect, but we werent (and couldnt, legally) just go into a pharmacy and ask for random documents, or lookup random names on the PMP. We had to have an initial lead, usually a doctor, or a pharmacist, who saw something suspicious. From there, its just checking state records, verifying what we saw with doctors, and getting paper evidence of the stuff we already knew was false. I had maybe 3 cases where we had a red flag, called the doc, and they doc said "Yeah thats legit" and that was the end of the conversation. I don't need to know why this patient is on this narcotic, I just needed to know if it was a fraudulent. If its not, then thats between the doc and the patient.

State law gave us authority to request pharmacy records, i.e. prescriptions and pickup logs, without a warrant. Most pharmacists did it with no hesitation. A few would want to make sure it wasn't a HIPPA violation (it wasnt) and that it was legal (it was).

Concerningly, I did have a_couple instances where I asked for documents and the employee started to provide them before I had a chance to identify myself.

In summary, if we were to blindly look at someones medical history or records without a bona fide articulable suspicion of a crime, it'd be massively illegal. If we did have a reason to look at the records, its because someone in the medical field saw something suspicious and reported it. From there we were mainly looking at records the government already had, and then finally getting medical records from the pharmacy that was just paper evidence of records we already had.

It's extensively documented that law enforcement breaks laws all the time. Your comment isn't reassuring at all - in fact, you're just describing how normalized the process for violating the 4th Amendment and patients' privacy is.

Well thats the rub, isn't it? Right now the courts don't see this as a violating of the 4th amendment. I can see the argument for requiring a warrant. Im not necessarily against the requirement, but this isn't normalizing a 4th amendment violation any more than license checkpoint (which the courts have also ruled isn't a violation)

[Edited to add the rest of the quote]

You omitted the end of my sentence in your quote, which is operative in this case. As explained in the article, the Third Party Doctrine establishes a loophole in 4th Amendment case law. The system you're describing is one which was created specifically to exploit this loophole: to violate patients' privacy while still complying with the 4th Amendment on technical grounds, all the while grossly violating it in spirit.

My apologies. I've re-added it with an edit note.

I think its a reach to say 'the system' was created to exploit 4th amendment loopholes, especially in this case. Again, the patients privacy isn't compromised by the pharmacies at all here. The state has its claim of a vested interest in prescription activity, much like with drivers licenses and vehicle registration, and has a database of said data, much like with licenses and vehicle registration.

If I start running tags to see where someone lives to stalk them, thats bad, and illegal. If I start running prescription data for someone to see what they're on and stalk them, thats bad and illegal.

If a car dealer says "These VINs on the car dont match, we think something was stolen" we can investigate it by accessing the state database. We will likely see some personal information of someone who isnt guilty of anything in the process of this investigation. If a doctor says "This person filled a prescription under my name that I didnt write" we can investigate it by accessing the state database. We will likely see some personal information of someone who isnt guilty of anything in the process of this investigation.

My assertion here isnt "Everything is fine, change nothing". Its "If you're concerned about privacy here, you are looking at the wrong target". Warrant requirements could be reasonable. Whether we get them or not, I think a good start would be auto-redacting Prescription Monitoring Program reports. If Doctor Adams says Bill filled a fraudulent script, because Adams doesnt write for percocet, I shouldnt see every name for every prescription on Adams' report. That should be redacted. Then if I see a script for percocet, which we've established is fraudulent, we then un-redact the "patient" name.

Again, CVS handing me a copy of a prescription that I already know is fake is the least significant issue at hand.

Succinctly:

- you described an _excellent_ process

- the key part is "concerningly sometimes ppl handed me stuff before I identified myself"

- there's nothing you can say or do to alleviate that

Furthering the Google analogy, with intent to clarify:

The Google version of this is "you can have all the data behind 20 locks and and 32 keys and 5 biometric measures and never let human eyes actually see it. Now let's turnover all Google employees. You sure they'll do the same thing?"

(the answer is no, after The Great McKinsey-ification and the corner-cutting and self-justification of lies demonstrated since ChatGPT)

Personally, I think that was a terrible ruling. Any suspicionless stop and check/investigation/search in a place everyone has a right to be should be treated as an unreasonable search.

The pharmacy records checks you're describing here are based on evidence that would likely hold up as probable cause in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Martinez-Fuer...

This is good to know.

It is proposed that this arrangement be modified to require a warrant.

Although I am comfortable accepting that your agency demonstrates the integrity you indicate, there are ~18k other law enforcement agencies in the US. A not insignificant number have long and well-documented histories of excessive and inappropriate record access. (And many, many other LEA have similar histories, even if they don't overreach as often.)

A warrant provides some judicial oversight. When accessing our private and confidential information, this is the reasonable default.

That defeats the entire point of this arrangement, which allows them to investigate in situations where the legal requirements for obtaining a warrant are not met. (Which is the elephant in the room: the entire premise of this system is to bypass established legal thresholds).

> Although I am comfortable accepting that your agency demonstrates the integrity you indicate

I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. As you mention, system abuse by law enforcement is incredibly common at agencies across the country. If you talk to any person at one of those agencies, they will almost invariably tell you that their coworkers take their job seriously, that they never abuse their own power, and that they can't imagine their coworkers doing the same.

> I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. As you mention, system abuse by law enforcement is incredibly common at agencies across the country.

I feel a benefit of the doubt costs us little in this instance and I feel we need a familiarity with what responsible policing looks like. To me, the OPs recounting provides that.

Past that, I believe that the widespread bad behavior of other agencies is insufficient reason for mistrust here. And casually using others' bad behavior to justify mistrust - this is something we reasonably criticize police for.

The point is that nearly every cop you talk to will sound like OP. That doesn't mean anything about the integrity of them or their coworkers; it just means that they're capable of articulating their own behavior in a way that makes them sound reasonable with no context. That's an incredibly low bar, one that nearly every abusive cop will clear.

To repeat what I said in a separate comment: Having worked extensively in this area, I'll be blunt and say that anytime someone who works in law enforcement says that there are no abuses of power in their workplace, that means either they were so oblivious that they never saw abuses that are occurring around them, or they were so mired in the system that they are incapable of recognizing the abuses of power that they themselves are participating in.

> Past that, I believe that the widespread bad behavior of other agencies is insufficient reason for mistrust here.

On the contrary, that's exactly what "systemic abuse of power" means. It means that the bad behavior is so ingrained in the operations of the system that individuals' actions contribute to its operations, whether or not they recognize or even understand it.

I'd agree that federal and state LEO serve their govs, unilaterally and universally. They exist to advance the interests of the party in power and campaign contributors.

As a public-of-individuals, our best interests may get occasionally get served by accident but our actual welfare is never, ever, not-ever the primary focus.

All that said, I still avoid Cops Suck as the default. Broadly speaking: The more local the force, the less certain is the system-serving corruption. You can get to a place with an ethical+competent commissioner/chief/sheriff. Under them, officers can be allowed to focus on being ethical+competent. I have personally witnessed this.

Where those officers might exist, I want to be fair.

The government, and any authority, should be mistrusted. Period.

That doesn't mean they aren't sometimes necessary, or that the lack of trust should turn into fear, but any person or organization on the winning end of a power imbalance should not be trusted. The lack of trust there is what leads to checks and balances, we need systems in place to make sure those with the power can't abuse it even if they wanted to.

The best scenario is that (a) the powerful aren't trusted (2) proper guardrails are in place and (d) the powerful actually do act honestly and the guardrails may slow them down a bit but don't prevent them from doing the job they were given power to do.

I mostly agree with that but we're talking about a response (mine) to a post, by someone who's communicating from the interior of an LEA.

His narrative could be propaganda or false or curated by agenda or unhelpfully incomplete or meaningfully representative. We don't know which of those it is. We do know that communication outside of PR channels is useful, even if we have to heavily qualify it.

And valuable info sometimes comes out of informal channels. We're not gaining anything by crapping on it here.

Past that, we risk nothing by assuming good faith of the OP's post - even if our good faith turns out to be misapplied. No judicial precedence is in play. No hearts are swayed to dark sides. No mass readership is being fed a pregurgitated conclusion. No agenda needles get budged.

In this place and at this time: We are safe letting one LEO-adjacent individual feel - well maybe not welcome but at least a lower level of mob noise. We don't have to put their haunches up by pushing back with everything we have.

Totally agree. This thread did go off the rails quite a bit. My main point wasn't actually even whether any one LEO can or should be trusted, I assume a vast majority of them are in the job with good intentions. My aim was more so at the power structure of any LEA or government in general, they should never be trusted IMO even when we're willing to take the risks of centralizing power for some greater good.

This is just 100% false. If im pulling a prescription from a pharmacy its because Doctor Adams told me "I never wrote a prescription for Bill Barnes for percocet, but this state maintained record says that he filled a prescription for percocet at CVS #12345 on main street". That statement alone is enough to get a warrant for said pharmacy records.

Great, then get a warrant.

The entire reason this story exists is because people are surprised and - rightfully - upset that law enforcement is able to access this information without one.

> Great, then get a warrant.

I agree with my whole heart. This is the meat and bone of the discussion.

And an important side note: The assertions "can't access without a warrant" and "can't access at all" need to be clearly distinct at all times. Once the 1st gets translated as the 2nd, the good faith portion of this discussion is lost.

But again, getting records from the pharmacy isn't really the issue. The government already has the records of the doctor that "wrote" the prescription. All the pharmacy is giving you is the physical copy of the record + data of who picked it up.

American pharmacies take special care to put our full names along with our doctors names and phone numbers just to make sure that nobody gets away with possessing drugs that the aren't allowed to have.

A big country like Iran banning alcohol seems unimaginable until you remember that for whatever reason alcohol is the only thing a big country like America hasn't banned.

As far as the commercial databases were concerned, I don't think we were told much more than this costs money, so don't waste searches.

But as for things like criminal history searches ("RAP sheets") we had training that stressed the illegality of looking up anyone without a justifiable legal reason. We were told to log the reason for doing every search. The training materials included news clippings about former police officers who were in prison for invalid use of the criminal history database. Once a year we were audited and asked to justify a selection of lookups we had done.

All systems are faillible and can be misused by bad actors. All systems are subject to cost-benefit analysis.

But I think it's valid that we have a system of law enforcement, that it be able, under appropriate circumstances and laws and checks and balances, to gain information that is sensitive and not publicly available.

Given that we've already empowered law enforcement agencies to enforce the law, its reasonable for them to step in here to catch those forging prescriptions and risking direct harm to others' rights. What is unreasonable and the main discussion above is the process of dodging the 4th amendment to investigate these people without a warrant.

IMO desperate person who tries to buy 90 pills of Oxycodone with forged prescription (OP's example) needs help, not a criminal record.

> What is unreasonable and the main discussion above is the process of dodging the 4th amendment to investigate these people without a warrant.

Fully agree with this.

Sure I definitely don't have a strong opinion on this. I don't have nearly enough first hand experience helping someone with a serious drug problem, or dealing with one myself. The debate over the best way to help people in this situation is firmly in the space of one that I'm happy to weigh in on but would heavily lean on those more experienced to share what they've found to work best.

Unrelated to drug charges, I was involved in helping a close relative through a criminal case that was entirely based on the testimony of one individual, with no hard evidence and other witnesses directly refuting the claim. I have very strong opinions about the legal system in general that would land me pretty squarely on the "provide help not a criminal record" in a vast majority of cases. Our legal system is a complete shit show.

Does this data get linked with the addicts other rxs in their name

Yes, law enforcement routinely goes to private companies to get data without a warrant, oftentimes in cases where a warrant would otherwise be required.

For example, Google only _just_ changed their internal policy of handing location data to LEO without a warrant - and while this sounds like great news, it's not as big as it seems, because other players (e.g. cell carriers) also have that data and are much more likely to hand it over than Google is. https://time.com/6539416/google-location-history-data-police...

Also, it's still available without a prescription, last I checked, it was just behind the counter/required an ID to track if you're grabbing a pack from every Walgreens in a 50 mile radius in a single night

Really? I couldn't find any data from that far back, but data from 2009 on shows that meth usage, overdose, and arrests climb pretty dramatically pretty much every year.

That's jurisdiction dependent. I had to remember to pack some when traveling for work in Oregon, since it was not available, even behind the counter.

And it’s done nothing. Hasn’t affected availability. Hasn’t cut down on illicit lab operations. Nothing.

People will say “It has cut down on the amount of pseudoephedrine going to illegal meth operations”, as if that in itself is a useful outcome instead of utterly meaningless.

I assume the situation is similar with pseudoephedrine, though the drug class/restrictions may be different.

As someone who has always used low-dose codeine+whatever analgesics when I have had a bad cold or migraine, I resent these being removed from the market recently as well. People can tell me that paracetamol and ibuprofen are just as effective until they're blue in the face, but that little bit of opiate uplift when I'm feeling like absolute shit was very psychologically helpful... Oh well, this is the world we live in.

It’s now synthesized in industrial sized cartel owned labs in Mexico using Chinese precursors and smuggled into the US, there’s no reason to keep pseudoephedrine restricted when it’s easier and cheaper to just buy the plentiful and cheap meth on the street.

Yes, which effectively makes it the same as needing a prescription because you can only get it if the pharmacy counter is open. Which is more restricted hours than the drugstore or grocery store itself.

I remember you could buy bottles of mini-thins at the pos of pretty much every liquor store in the country in the late 90s/early 00s. Used to be sold in bottles of 100 for like 5 bucks.

I'm not saying I agree with the dark forest. I just wanted to assert that the dark forest idea isn't limited to "we have something they want". It could also include. "They're jerks"

We still have a lot of work to do to raise awareness among nannies about the legal risks of caring very young infants. It can happen to anyone: about 1/3000 babies are affected, and the risk is much higher with babies combining multiple risk factors (male sex, prematurity, low birth weight, high head circumference, respiratory problems, frequent infections, etc.).

Military pilots do have camera systems like the ATFLIR pods on F-18s but the pentagon only declassifies those videos when it’s useful - like when the Chinese jet made an American military plan fly through its fumes recently

And that's even if we ignore the claim that people repeatedly see something. If I was a pilot and spotted something weird more than once, I'd make sure I record every flight from then on - can't imagine not doing it.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13dmaif/black_triangl...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/12kaed7/2010_ufo_that...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/t4smpl/flyby_uap_foot...

* https://imgur.io/a/seWVHB6

I’ve done some basic research and can attest none of these are at least CGI made. Some of these predate photoshop. The issue with all of these videos are they are hard to prove definitively without corroborating sensor data. But they are interesting none the less.

I hope this gets resolved soon, but I also hope this data doesn't become immediately classified.

Is he saying that military AI should specifically target Philistines and the uncircumcised? Will the military AI enslave people but give them the option of freedom or permanent servitude after 7 years?

You can't base something on Judeo-Christian ethics because both the Hebrew bible and new testament are a giant compendium of people disagreeing with G-d and each other on proper ethics.

Spot on! What’s even more ironic is that Christianity isn’t even western or European.

The number of all Muslims only surpassed members of the Catholic church around 2008. There are still substantially more Christians as a whole, including Orthodox and Protestants. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23885015

Based on current population growth, in the next 10 years, there should be more Muslims than Christians. From wikipedia's chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Histo... - 1970: 577mm - 2000: 1.291b - 2013: 1.635b - 2016: 1.8b - 2020: 2b

For comparison, the Catholic church currently has 1.36b members, and Christians overall are estimated at 2.3 billion.

No, he means more of the Old Testament variety of ethics.

Also better hope the AI doesn't start flinging comets our way to trigger a global flood; the divine rainbow pledge doesn't seem to bind other agents?

A simple example Exodus 21:22-25 says:

"When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman's husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe."

Jesus refers to it directly in Matthew 5:38-39:

"You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."

So it would be useful to know what values exactly the general had in mind.