Privacy and addiction
A reader asks where patients being treated for substance abuse should have privacy protections.
In a word, no.
Alcohol and other-drug addicts, particularly in the early stages of their disease, often commit great harm to others. They also are likely responsible for at least 25% of society’s medical costs, and possibly much more when we include peripheral diseases and disorders. Addicts don’t want to stop using (for a variety of reasons involving a sense of power, which I can explain if you’d like) and must always be coerced into abstinence. Violating their purported right to privacy would increase the odds of such coercion being imposed by others.
All too often, close persons haven’t a clue that a friend, co-worker or even family member is an addict. Breaking the chains of “privacy” at the medical level offers a chance for close people to discover the underlying causes of physical maladies, from which they may put two and two together and figure out the causes of the verbal and other abuse they experience.
In other words, such “protections” are actually laws that serve only to enable addicts’ continuing use of the drugs that cause misbehaviors, all sorts of medical illnesses and maladies, and other problems in and around addicts. This doesn’t do anyone any good. Privacy in at least this area should be abolished or, at least, greatly curtailed.