Rehab staffers can reject queries on Noelle Bush

A judge says the need to protect a patient's privacy outweighs police interest in how the governor's daughter acquired crack cocaine.

©Associated Press
October 1, 2002

ORLANDO -- A judge ruled Monday that staff members at the drug rehabilitation center where Gov. Jeb Bush's daughter is receiving treatment do not have to answer police questions about a piece of crack cocaine allegedly found in her shoe.

Circuit Judge Belvin Perry ruled that a federal law protecting a drug treatment patient's privacy outweighs the interest of the police officers' investigation of drug possession.

If the drug treatment counselors were forced to give testimony, then "all patients who suffer relapses could be hauled out of treatment programs and into criminal courts on the whim of a state prosecutor or police officers," the judge wrote.

Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton said his office would appeal.

"Saying essentially to drug patients, "Go ahead. You can't be prosecuted for using drugs at the center' -- I wonder if that's valuable for their treatment," Ashton said. "The court's decision says we can't even inquire about how a person got drugs."

Ashton made a similar argument to Perry earlier in September when he said refusing to require the drug rehab staff members to cooperate with authorities would create "a situation in which a drug center is an island of absolute immunity for prosecution for drug crimes." A transcript of the closed hearing was made public Monday at the Orlando Sentinel's request.

The State Attorney's Office issued subpoenas for four staff members at the Center for Drug-Free Living in Orlando after police received a report from another patient on Sept. 9 that Noelle Bush had been found with cocaine in her shoe. Investigators also tried to depose a staff member.

Workers at the Center for Drug-Free Living refused to cooperate, citing privacy concerns. One staff member wrote a statement for officers but ripped it up after a supervisor intervened.

In his ruling, Perry said Florida's drug court program would be destroyed if patients could be taken by police from treatment centers and placed in criminal courts for drug possession. Drug courts allow addicts to seek treatment under judicial supervision rather than be tried in criminal court.

The governor said he was pleased with the decision because confidentiality is a fundamental part of treatment.

"Our drug court system is based on the fact that the road to recovery is a rocky one. If counselors are required to report every violation, then it makes treatment very difficult to work," Bush said.

Drug treatment professionals elsewhere said that only under rare circumstances is law enforcement called in if a patient is found with drugs and that it didn't appear that Noelle Bush, 25, is getting special treatment.

A ruling against the Orlando center would have had a chilling effect on people seeking treatment, said Jim Aiello, vice president at Gateway Rehabilitation Center in Aliquippa, Pa.

"It's set up to protect the confidentiality of the patients so they can be focused on treatment and not worried about what they say may get them in trouble," he said.

Noelle Bush was put in a court-ordered rehabilitation program in February after she was arrested at a pharmacy drive-through window for allegedly trying to buy the antianxiety drug Xanax with a fraudulent prescription.

She then was jailed for two days in July after she was found in possession of a bag of prescription medicine taken from a medicine cabinet in a nurse's office.

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