Implications of the Constitutional Right of Privacy for the Control of Drugs

Abstract

Probably no Constitutional issue has created as much interest in academic circles over the past several years as has the development of the Constitutional right of privacy and, with the exception of the debate over affirmative action, no issue has led to such a volume of both judicial and scholarly writing. There are now several excellent descriptions, analyses, and histories of the right of privacy.1 The purpose of this survey presentation is to evaluate the development of the Constitutional right of privacy and those social policies that must underlie it in order to determine how the United States Supreme Court might apply the right of privacy to drug prohibitions and regulations and what implications the underlying social policies ought to have for our drug laws.