102
Scalia, J., dissenting
or in the urine tests performed, in a hospital—especially in a State such as South Carolina, which recognizes no physician-patient testimonial privilege and requires the physician's duty of confidentiality to yield to public policy, see McCormick v. England, 328 S. C. 627, 633, 640-642, 494 S. E. 2d 431, 434, 438-439 (App. 1997); and which requires medical conditions that indicate a violation of the law to be reported to authorities, see, e. g., S. C. Code Ann. § 20-7-510 (2000) (child abuse). Cf. Whalen v. Roe, 429 U. S. 589, 597- 598 (1977) (privacy interest does not forbid government to require hospitals to provide, for law enforcement purposes, names of patients receiving prescriptions of frequently abused drugs).
The concurrence makes essentially the same basic error as the Court, though it puts the point somewhat differently: "The special needs cases we have decided," it says, "do not sustain the active use of law enforcement . . . as an integral part of a program which seeks to achieve legitimate, civil objectives." Ante, at 88. Griffin shows that is not true. Indeed, Griffin shows that there is not even any truth in the more limited proposition that our cases do not support application of the special-needs exception where the "legiti-mate, civil objectives" are sought only through the use of law enforcement means. (Surely the parole officer in Griffin was using threat of reincarceration to assure compliance with parole.) But even if this latter proposition were true, it would invalidate what occurred here only if the drug testing sought exclusively the "ultimate" health benefits achieved by coercing the mothers into drug treatment through threat of prosecution. But in fact the drug testing sought, independently of law enforcement involvement, the "immediate" health benefits of identifying drug-impaired mother and child for necessary medical treatment. The concurrence concedes that if the testing is conducted for medical reasons, the fact that "prosecuting authorities then adopt legitimate procedures to discover this information and prosecution follows
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