Fun and Games

By Jerry Pournelle

April 5, 2004

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Internet Commerce: The Medical Roulette Game

We all get the spam, offers for Viagra and other drugs through the Internet. Your virtual pharmacy, some of them term themselves.

While there are undoubtedly some legitimate Web based "drug store" operations with real discounts and acceptable quality control, most are something less than that. You may get counterfeit drugs, generics made up to resemble a name brand, and I don't mean just Viagra, either. One sting operation found that about half the Nexium "purple pills" for dyspepsia sold on the Web were not only knock-offs of the actual name brand, but badly compounded with varying strengths and quality of components.

Then there's the "online physician consultation" service for prescription drugs. Some of these insist that you have a Web camera, and the "consultation" sounds quite genuine, but again, in most such cases you have no way to prove that the nice chap you spoke to is an actual MD—or even in the United States.

If you must deal with online drug suppliers, it would be well to check with the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy to see if your supplier is approved. There are only a couple of dozen that meet their standards. I don't think any of them offer online consultations: You'll need a valid prescription to deal with them.

There are more issues here than fraud and drug quality, though. Consider a real Internet drug house in the sense that what they offer for sale is actually what you will get: no substitutions, no quality control problems. Prescription drugs by mail, and to cover their tracks they offer online consultations with actual MDs. Viagra, painkillers, tranquilizers, whatever, available on request with a minimum of fuss and bother. Such Web sites exist.

At this point we have issues that go way beyond use and abuse of the Internet: What these Web sites are doing is negating the FDA regulation of many drugs.

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