Pervasive Government Surveillance To Achieve Human Perfection: Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs
/In the ongoing project to achieve human perfection through government action, pervasive surveillance of the population plays a growing role.
After all, if the government can monitor everything you do all the time, then utopia will be just around the corner. The always-observing benevolent bureaucrats will be sure to make committing a crime completely unthinkable. The same goes for not paying your bills on time, or being mean to your wife — or criticizing those in power.
Thankfully we don’t have anything like that — not! In fact we have multiple nascent and growing pieces of such a system. Mostly those pieces are being developed quietly and out of sight, without disclosure of what is occurring, so that it’s impossible for you to know exactly how much of your activities are being observed for later use against you. Big examples include government data collection on financial transactions (except those done with cash!) and the increasing data collection from automobiles.
There is one very big area of data collection on the population where quite a bit of information is available, both as to the data collected and the efficacy of the data collection effort in achieving the stated objective. That area is prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs).