A Recent Supreme Court Decision Has Had A Direct Impact In North Carolina | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Jon Guze, who is the Director of Legal Studies for the John Locke Foundation.

    In June, the US Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Los Angeles Municipal Code. The Court held that, under the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures, "The provision of the Los Angeles Municipal Code that requires hotel operators to make their registries available to the police on demand is facially unconstitutional."

    That holding is already having a direct effect in North Carolina. As WXII reports:

    A city of Burlington ordinance requiring hotels to provide police with names on their registries or face criminal consequences is unconstitutional, a District Court judge ruled Thursday.

    Judge Steven Messick made the ruling in the case of a man whose name was found and recognized by police on a hotel registry. That man was later charged with drug possession subsequent to a search of the hotel....

    Messick's ruling was based on a decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down a law in the city of Los Angeles that gave hotel owners no choice but to hand over their registries -- without requiring search warrants or court review -- or face criminal consequences.

    Burlington ordinance 23-41 requires hotels and motels to keep their guest registries for as long as one year and allow them to be inspected "at any reasonable time by the chief of police or his designee...while in the performance of his duties."...

    "What (police) can't do anymore is search that registry," [defense attorney Bryan] Ray said. "They can't basically profile, and say, 'John Smith has a criminal history; let's knock on his door.'"...

    Subsequent to the ruling, [Assistant District Attorney Brooks] Stone dismissed the case for insufficient evidence....

    Stone was unsure whether other pending cases might be affected by Messick's ruling. He also said North Carolina's high courts hadn't weighed in on the motel registry issue yet.

Another Recent Federal Court Decision Could Have an Indirect Impact Everywhere

    Earlier this month, the US District Court of the Southern District of New York announced its decision in Amarin Pharma, Inc. v. FDA. As healthcare economist John Goodman reports in Forbes, this is "a victory for free speech and common sense" that could improve Americans' access to life-saving drugs:

    Once a drug has been approved for one use, it is very common for researchers to discover it has other, unapproved uses. For example, more than half the cancer drugs doctors prescribe are "off-label." They are being used to treat a condition other than the use for which they were originally approved.

    Although doctors are free to prescribe any drug for any purpose, according to the FDA drug companies can only communicate uses for a drug that have FDA approval. Communicating off-label uses is a crime.

    It's also a crime that the FDA pursues rigorously. Take the case of Alfred Caronia, a pharmaceutical sales representative. In 2012, he was convicted after being caught on tape talking to a doctor about off label uses for the narcolepsy drug Xyrem. But a Manhattan federal appeals court tossed out the conviction, ruling that as long as Mr. Caronia's speech was truthful and not misleading, it was protected by the First Amendment....

    All that appeared to change last Friday, when a federal district judge in Manhattan said that the FDA could not prohibit the truthful promotion of a drug for unapproved uses because doing so would violate the protection of free speech.

    You would think this issue would be a no brainer. But serious people line up on the other side. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote a commentary titled "In Opposition to Liberty: We Need a 'Sovereign' to Govern Drug Claims" in the Annals of Internal Medicine in June.

    Yet this is exactly what the founding fathers rejected. We don't need a sovereign to discover truth, according to Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues. The surest way to the discovery of truth is a free market in ideas.

    The founders may have rejected the policing of speech, but, as The New York Times Reports, the FDA has a powerful incentive to go on doing it, and the ultimate disposition of this case remains uncertain:

    There is a good chance the F.D.A. will appeal.... Over the last few years, the government reached major criminal and civil settlements with GlaxoSmithKline ($3 billion), Abbott Laboratories ($1.5 billion), Merck ($950 million) and Amgen ($762 million) related to off-label promotions of their products.

    Nevertheless,The Times gives us reasons to be hopeful:

    That appeal would go to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, however, and the conclusion in the Caronia case that the First Amendment protects truthful statements about off-label drug use will be difficult to overcome, especially when there is no evidence of fraud or other deception by Amarin. Pursuing the issue to the Supreme Court may also present substantial hurdles for the F.D.A.'s regulation of off-label marketing. The justices have been receptive in the last few years to First Amendment claims by corporations, as the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shows, so they may well side with companies that want to make truthful statements about their products.

Go Back


Leave a Guest Comment

Your Name or Alias
Your Email Address ( your email address will not be published)
Enter Your Comment ( no code or urls allowed, text only please )




Civitas Poll: Voters Want Tax Protection John Locke Foundation Guest Editorial, Editorials, Op-Ed & Politics Critics: CCNC Audit Accurate But Not Very Useful


HbAD0

Latest Op-Ed & Politics

Be careful what you wish for, you may get it
America needs to wake up and get its priorities right
Former President Donald Trump suggested this week that if he becomes president again, he might allow Prince Harry to be deported.
It's a New Year, which means it's time to make resolutions — even for prominent evangelical leaders. The Babylon Bee asked the following well-known figures in the faith what they hope to accomplish in 2024:
Vice President Kamala Harris will visit a Minnesota Planned Parenthood clinic, reportedly the first time a president or vice president has visited an abortion facility.
An eight-mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville has been temporarily closed due to a string of “human and bear interactions,” the National Parks Service announced.
University of Wisconsin tried to punish conservatives for the fact that liberals regularly commit crimes to silence opposition
most voters think EU officials not doing a good job on illegal immigration
Come from behind by GOP candidate is a blueprint to 2024

HbAD1

 
Back to Top