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For the most part, attorney Tyler Ayres practices criminal law in Draper, Utah. If you Google him, the first result reads “Utah DUI Attorney.” But recently, Ayres has grown into a de facto voice against the third-party doctrine and Utah’s drug database, a combination allowing authorities to access citizens' prescription drug histories nearly carte blanche. Ayres has represented at least a dozen people with unforeseen issues because of this arrangement. The worse abuse he’s seen involves two of his clients: Candy Holmes and Russell Smithey.
Both Holmes and Smithey have extensive criminal histories. In a recent interview, Smithey conceded that he was an intravenous drug user and has since completed a drug court program. In 2011, his partner, Holmes, was picking up her prescription at a pharmacy near their home in Vernal, Utah. Both Holmes and Smithey regularly took Oxycodone and Methadone.
Ben Murray, an officer with the Vernal City Police Department, watched this Holmes encounter with the pharmacist, according to Smithey and confirmed by deposition documents. Murray says that “she was so intoxicated that she couldn’t even get her money out.”
Smithey tells the story differently. He says Murray saw Holmes take some of the medication and get into her car to drive home. It would have taken longer than the drive home for the pills to set in, he explains. Either way, the undisputed facts are that Murray contacted dispatch and Holmes was arrested in her driveway after failing a sobriety test.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ill-never-ask-for-another-pain-pill-again-℞-database-damage-in-utah/
[Related]: The big drug database in the sky: One firefighter’s year-long legal nightmare
(Score: 5, Informative) by Zinho on Thursday May 14 2015, @03:42PM
The summary for this article does a poor job of explaining the nature of the complaint, let me give it a shot:
Officer Murray was using the Utah drug database to monitor when the plaintiffs were refilling their prescriptions. The officer would then come to their home, on the pretense of counting their pills to make sure they weren't being abused, and then stealing pills on a routine basis. This only stopped when the plaintiffs set up a hidden camera and filmed the thefts in action.
The problem goes beyond opportunities for "parallel construction" of evidence on abuse cases, it's providing opportunities for criminals in uniform to prey upon citizens with legitimate drug needs. If there was ever a counter-argument for the meme of "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide", this is it.
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