What is Being Done About Online Prescription Drug Dealers?
The “New Age” Drug dealer is no longer a sleazy character you meet in a dark alley somewhere to make a drug score. The world has changed and so has the way illegal drugs are procurred. Today’s new drug dealer is found online. Exploiting loopholes in the law, the “rogue pharmacies” find doctors who are retired or in debt and for money will sign off on applications made on the internet for drugs (Vicodin and hydrocodone top the list) and pharmacies will ship these narcotic painkillers to patients who have never seen a doctor face to face. The doctors will receive from $10-$25 per patient, the pharmacies receive extra bonuses - and the addicted no longer have to “doctor shop” — they just let their fingers do the walking across the keyboard of their computers. The result is easy, anonymous, and above all, “legal” access to narcotics.
A recent article from the Associated Press reported:
“Drug shipments from illegal online pharmacies were once so frequent in Appalachia that delivery companies had to add trucks to their routes.”
With the help of unscrupulous physicians and pharmacists, hundreds of Web sites dispense prescription narcotics to customers in exchange for nothing more than a credit card number.
The DEA found that 34 “rogue” pharmacies dispensed more than 98.5 dosage units of hydrocodone last year which is enough to give 410,000 patients a one month supply.
The AP report went on to say:
“The sites approach small pharmacies and persuade them to fill the prescription and ship the pharmaceuticals to the customers. The Web sites target pharmacies struggling to make ends meet, and usually pay an additional fee on top of the cost of the medication.Prescription drugs can legally be ordered online, but rogue pharmacies ignore the rules that legitimate pharmacies follow, like requiring a doctor-patient relationship and getting a certification from state boards. The difference between legitimate and rogue pharmacies can be confusing.”
Shouldn’t doctors be punished for working with “rogue” pharmacies online?
Where is the outrage? What is our government doing about it? Where is the Drug Czar? Out to dinner with executives from Pharmaceutical companies! Why isn’t there a national data base that would enable information about drug use to be readily available so “victims” of drug abuse cannot go willy-nilly from one doctor to another or to one of these unscrupulous online operations?
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