Orange County Register

The FBI is warning consumers to be wary of using online pharmacies, saying many of them are illegal, the drugs could be expired or counterfeit, and they could put patients at risk.

Ads for the pharmacies are everywhere on the Internet, from appearing on medical-related news stories to your email inbox. More than 80,000 websites sell ad space for medications and and link to one of more than 1,400 websites that allow customers to place orders through illegal pharmacies, the FBI says.

Most will fill orders without prescriptions from your doctor. Instead, they pay doctors to “take a quick glance at your brief medical questionnaire,” the FBI says.

“They don’t know if you are drug-addicted, underage, or have another condition that their medications could make worse,” the FBI says. “Worse yet, the products they peddle are questionable at best.”

The FBI says many drugs may be way past their expiration date, mislabeled or contaminated, made from suspicious raw materials in underground laboratories that are outside the scrutiny of federal regulators.

So how do you know if you’re dealing with a bad pharmacy? If they don’t make you jump through the hoops that legitimate pharmacies require, such as:

• Require a prescription from a licensed doctor, usually by mail (if they accept a fax copy, they will always call your doctor to verify the prescription).
• Make you submit a detailed medical history.
• Clearly state their payment, privacy, and shipping fees on their sites.
• Use secure or encrypted website connections for transactions.
• Many legitimate online pharmacies are also certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, although some of the larger ones may not be certified because of their already well-recognized names.

The FBI is trying to crack down on these illegal operations. For example, in August 2007, 18 people were indicted for operating an illegal online pharmacy that netted more than $126 million over a two-year period.

What do you think?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.