State v. Welch

Today, the majority rules that the police have unlimited access to the prescription records of every pharmacist in the state of Vermont and may, without warrant or probable cause, search those records in hopes of finding violations of law, not by pharmacists, but by patients. In other words, as a consequence of today’s ruling, the prescription records of all persons held by a Vermont pharmacist are open to unrestricted surveillance by the police.

One of the great conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court once observed that <([t]he history of liberty has largely been the history…