Florida Supreme Court Grants Rush an Extension

From NewsMax.com.

In case anyone has trouble sorting out the case of Limbaugh v. Florida, the issue is whether a county prosecutor can seize a person's medical records when all it has is an unsubstantiated rumor that the patient might have "shopped around" for doctors to prescribe large quantities of Schedule Two or other tightly controlled drugs. Now I don't care to see a society of happy-pill takers. In fact, John the Revelator said some pointed things about drug abuse [ch. 9, v. 21] in his vision of the future. (Not to mention Hippocrates of Cos, who enjoined his students not to give deadly substances to their patients even if those same patients ask for them.) And when Rush Limbaugh realized that he had gotten addicted to prescription painkillers, admitted that on the air, and sought and received treatment for that addiction, I applauded him.

I also think it's too easy for doctors to over-prescribe medications without properly examining the medications that other doctors are prescribing. Medical schools are at least trying to educate their students to "vet" all existing prescriptions and not hesitate to "stop" certain drugs even when other physicians have prescribed them. It's an uphill battle, but they're in it for the long haul, and it's good to see. Did such over-prescription and redundant prescription occur in Rush's case? It's possible--and more likely to have resulted more from a few honest mistakes than from deliberate criminal intent. (And it probably happens more often than you think, which is why, whenever you go to a new doctor, always--always--take with you every pill bottle that you take pills out of, so that this new doctor knows what you're taking and can judge whether you ought to stop taking some of those pills.)

But the Palm Beach County prosecutor won't leave it alone, although:

1. He had zero evidence of any crime to start with in Rush's case, and furthermore:
2. Most cases of this type don't even go to trial if the patient will seek treatment on his own, as Rush did.

So why is this prosecutor going to such lengths to find such evidence? Because his Democratic Party friends want Rush off the air, any way they can get him off. Of course, as time continues to pass, the case has progressively less impact on Rush's life or career, so nothing short of an actual arrest can stop Rush now. The prosecutor doesn't have nearly enough evidence for that, and he knows it--or he would have done it by now.

Rush is not actually afraid of what the prosecutor might find. He is defending the fundamental principle that prosecutors do not go looking for evidence on the basis of unsubstantiated rumors. If anyone other than that prosecutor really thinks that Rush has brought some definable harm to society, then let that person make a citizen's complaint for that prosecutor to act on. Absent any such complaint, the prosecutor should drop this case and stop wasting the time, money, and other resources of his office. Yes, I know that Palm Beach County is not Dade County, where the bullets fly so frequently that the Dade County Coroner's Office remains to this day the most sought-after place to train in forensic pathology. But surely even in such a staid place as Palm Beach County, the prosecutor has other things on his plate that he ought to attend to, and stop trying to railroad a prominent resident, just because other prominent residents would like to see him carted away in handcuffs!

More to the point, if this prosecutor gets away with this, nothing will stop any other prosecutor from doing the same thing to someone far less able to defend himself than is Rush Limbaugh. So in a very important sense, Rush is acting like a sentinel of liberty.