Operation Netroid (Internet Pharmacy) athlete customer names may not be revealed

An Albany New York judge ruled yesterday that tens of 1000s of customers of the Internet Florida pharmacy -Signature Pharmacy- customers may request their names remain private rather than be publicly released.  That courtesy may also extend to athletes such as Gary Matthews Jr., whose name was released by Sports Illustrated as a customer of a similar Internet pharmacy.

Tens of thousands of people across the United States who purchased drugs from an Orlando pharmacy at the center of an Albany steroids case must be notified that their prescription records were seized by police, a Florida judge ruled this week.

Those drug buyers, many of whom bought steroids through companies that have Web sites, will then have 30 days to object to their records being used in court, the judge said. The judge also ordered police to stop sifting through the documents until medical privacy issues have been resolved.

Albany DA David Soares met with MLB and NFL officials to discuss releasing names of athletes who used the Netroid pharmacy services. Looks like this will be on hold too.

The issue appears muddied. Signature pharmacy lawyers argued this point successfully, however the argument likely is bogus.  People who obtain prescriptions are not 'patients' but are 'customers' and thus have no legal protection.  Further physician patients records are not confidential to the government, unless the records relate to psychiatric visits.

Internet pharmacy prescriptions may not even be doctor-patient related.  A person calling in for a bogus prescription using a bogus Internet doctor supplied by the pharmacy is a clear fraudulent, and unethical  relationship.  Toe even consider this as protected by doctor-client privilege is an atrocity.

The idiocy continues here:

(the pharmacy's lawyer) also challenged whether Signature's attorneys were seeking the sealing order in the interest of protecting their patients' privacy, noting that investigators had pulled complete patient records from the pharmacy's trash bins, including just two nights before last week's hearing.

If those were legitimate patient records why were they in the trash bin. Proper disposal pf patient related records mandates shredding first. Anything in the trash is trash.

Even in legitimate (if one can call Limbaugh legitimate) case medical records can be released to the court:

Syndicated radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh tried unsuccessfully to keep police in Florida from viewing his medical records after they were subpoenaed amid allegations he "doctor shopped" in order to fuel an addiction to prescription painkillers. A Florida appeals court ruled in that case that people who are the targets of a criminal investigation cannot invoke patient privacy rules in order to avoid prosecution.

This action will delay release of names, thus just one more layer of red tape that lets steroid cheaters get away free.

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