Picture a typical morning. If you’re like me, you head into the
kitchen, pour yourself a cup of coffee, scan the newspaper, and
take your vitamins and prescription drugs. Imagine if, after
washing down those pills with your coffee, you were to cough out
a rat.
Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. That’s the storyline in a
new
commercial being aired in British movie theaters, alerting
moviegoers to the very real fact that most online pharmacies sell
counterfeit drugs. And counterfeits are sometimes laced with rat
poison.
The hard-hitting advertisement, created by Pfizer in
collaboration with several U.K. patient advocacy groups and
Britain’s government drug regulator, is quite disgusting. But
it’s an important message. And it’s a message that Americans,
too, need to see. That’s why the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) should join up with drug firms to launch a similar public
awareness campaign here in the United States.
According to the World Health Organization, about 10 percent of
the global drug supply is counterfeit. Many of these dangerous
pills are sold online by fly-by-night pharmacies. Patients often
go online to illegally purchase pills because they want to save
money, skip the doctor, or get a drug for recreational use.
Counterfeit online outfits are very effective at hiding where
they’re actually based. A few years ago, for instance, the FDA
purchased several popular prescription drugs from an online
pharmacy claiming to be headquartered in Canada. What they found
was startling. Not only were none of the drugs manufactured in
Canada, but they all failed to meet the FDA’s standards for
purity and strength.
In 2007, the respected Internet fraud expert MarkMonitor looked
at 3,160 online pharmacies claiming to sell legitimate drugs.
Virtually all of the online pharmacies, though, were selling fake
medicine. In fact, only four of the sites were accredited by
Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites, the drug industry’s
“Good Housekeeping” seal of approval.
So when customers get bilked after buying drugs online,
regulators often can’t even determine the perpetrator’s physical
location, making it effectively impossible to enforce existing
drug safety laws.
What’s more, when compared to the United States, most nations are
quite lax when it comes to drug safety. So even the drugs sold
from legitimate online foreign pharmacies pose a health threat.
The European Union’s drug market, for instance, operates under a
“parallel trade” ordinance, which allows for legal, unfettered
importation between all member countries. Among other things,
this means that the independent wholesalers along the chain of
supply are allowed to open and repackage drug shipments before
passing them along. So if American consumers go online and
purchase drugs that have passed through the European Union, they
could end up with a mislabeled, expired, or otherwise subpar
product.
Online pharmacies based in Canada are largely supplied by
European manufacturers — so their pills, too, can be dangerous.
It’s imperative that American patients be made aware of the
dangers of making online drug purchases. The FDA can give them
the information they need by following its British counterpart
and launching a public awareness campaign.
