Online Pharmacies Put Consumers at Risk
Last year, Americans spent $307.4 billion on prescription drugs (IMS Institute), the most of any other country. And with the price of many prescription drugs so high, 36 million people have turned to online pharmacies to purchase their prescriptions. But these online pharmacies aren’t as trustworthy as they may seem.
Desperate to cut off the supply of potentially dangerous and highly addictive prescription drugs to America’s youth, the U.S. Department of Justice has now opened a criminal investigation into Google for profiting from advertisements on its site, sold to these online pharmacies. Google has reportedly set aside $500 million to pay fines for facilitating online pharmaceutical advertisements. Experts are expecting this will be the biggest fine charged in U.S. history.
To consumers in need of medications, online pharmacies seem like a good idea because their prices are much lower than their retail counterparts. But these companies also make it easy for consumers to order dangerous drugs over the Internet without a prescription. Some consumers have even reported receiving prescriptions they ordered that were signed by doctors they had never met. If you google “online prescriptions,” you will find that the first website that pops up claims that no prescription is needed for consumers to get any drugs they want.
Google has filed lawsuits against many of the online pharmacies that bought advertisements on Google. Joseph Califano, president of Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, warned Google in 2008 that the advertisements they were selling were being bought by these online pharmacies, which were being operated without the proper supervision. He says he also warned Google that these online pharmacies were being used by youth to obtain highly addictive prescription drugs.
Google didn’t do anything about the problem then, but has since said that they stopped selling advertisements to these online pharmacies over a year ago.
In the past decade, online pharmacies have fed the United States’ addiction to prescription drugs. A recent study out of the University of Southern California has found that states that had the fastest expansion of high-speed internet in the early 2000s also had the highest number of hospital admissions for drug overdoses.
Today, an estimated seven million people use prescription drugs illegally, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). And prescription drug abuse is growing among teenagers, 59 percent of whom say they were given the drugs from family and friends. NIDA reports that one out of every 12 high school seniors uses vicodin, and one out of every 20 high school seniors uses oxycontin.
Law enforcement authorities say they have no doubts that online pharmacies have led to higher addiction rates in the United States. But law enforcement alone cannot stop these rouge pharmacies from dispensing dangerous drugs without prescriptions. They need the help of Internet companies like Google to shut down these pharmacies.
Another issue with online pharmacies is that they dispense counterfeit drugs, which can be very dangerous. Even people buying prescriptions online for legitimate reasons may be cheated by these online companies.
