Hawaii’s medical marijuana list erroneously released

Medical marijuana list released | HonoluluAdvertiser.com | The Honolulu Advertiser
Angry telephone calls started coming in to the state Department of Public Safety almost as soon as the June 27 issue of the Hawai’i Tribune-Herald hit the streets.

A front-page article on medical marijuana mentioned that the department had provided a database with patient names and addresses, the locations of their plants, their certificate numbers, and their prescribing doctors.

The breach of privacy was an inadvertent mistake, and the newspaper did not name any of the patients, but many were alarmed because the information is like providing a roadmap for a stash of legal pot.

On Monday, Clayton Frank, the department’s director, sent letters of apology to the 4,200 medical marijuana patients statewide, informing many who had not read the article that their confidential information had been compromised.

The letter explained the information had been forwarded by e-mail to a Tribune-Herald reporter who had asked for statistics on medical marijuana users. The department’s information technology personnel have since isolated the list and added other internal controls to prevent it from being mistakenly released in the future.

David Bock, the newspaper’s editor, said the newspaper complied with the department’s request to destroy the information.

“We just wanted to know the number of people in Hawai’i County who were currently receiving medical marijuana,” Bock said. “And they erroneously sent us the list with the actual names.”

Under the law’s administrative rules, patient names and other information is confidential and can only be disclosed to law enforcement as verification that patients are in the program.

Of course, the reason that the private information was even able to be leaked in the first place is because of the prohibition against marijuana for healthy people.  There has to be a list to keep track of the legal sick people who smoke pot because it’s still illegal for most people to smoke pot.  I write this to remind the medical patients that just because “you gots yours” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be fighting for the responsible use of marijuana by the rest of us.  Until you do, you will always suffer high black market pricing, plant limits, possession limits, rip-offs, privacy breaches, law enforcement harassment, and difficulty acquiring medicine.