In another sloppy example of government errors made in the war on drugs, Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety amazingly emailed the entire list of state authorized medical marijuana patients to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. The paper ran a front page story mentioning how the state had provided the names, addresses, card numbers, and recommending physicians of all Hawaii’s registered patients.
Needless to say the over 4,200 people who find marijuana helpful with a doctors recommendation were not impressed with the breach.
"Nobody here was a very happy camper," said James Propotnick, the department's deputy director for law enforcement. "People started calling. ... We were notified immediately. I don't think the paper was hot off the press 15 minutes and we started getting calls."
From what the editor is saying it looks like this all arose because of someone being lazy with very secure information.
"We just wanted to know the number of people in Hawai'i County who were currently receiving medical marijuana, and they erroneously sent us the list with the actual names."So from this perspective it seems the Department of Public Safety just sent the whole list out instead of actually counting the number of patients. The information requested clearly was not that complex and rather then taking ten minutes to answer a media inquiry, they have threatened the security of Hawaii’s patients and their medicine.
Thankfully Hawaii’s best and brightest are on the case.
"It has to do with safety," Propotnick said. "Let's say that there's a whole lot of people who want to steal marijuana and you publish the list with the names and addresses. Now what have we done?”
Thank you Captain obvious.