WASHINGTON—The Partnership for Safe Medicines, a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to protecting consumers from counterfeit medicines, issued the following statement regarding recent reports released by LegitScript, an online pharmacy verification service, and KnujOn, an Internet compliance company, which found that 80 to 90 percent of search engine-sponsored advertisements of online drug pharmacies violate federal and state laws, including selling substandard or counterfeit drugs to unsuspecting consumers.
The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM) applauds the research LegitScript and KnujOn are conducting and for highlighting the systemic problems associated with online pharmacy advertisements. Consistent with earlier findings published by PSM’s vice president Bryan A. Liang, search engine companies’ flagrantly disregard public health and safety when they permit an illegal online pharmacy to advertise on their sites. These sellers are not legitimate, licensed online pharmacies; they are criminal operations. LegitScript and KnujOn’s findings confirm the importance of one of the Partnership’
“Rogue online pharmacies continue to profit from the sale of counterfeit drugs,” said Marv Shepherd, Ph.D., PSM president and director of the Center for Pharmacoeconomic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Pharmacy. “What’
“While Congress has passed laws to combat selling prescription drugs online without a prescription, they have failed to include penalties for the search engines advertising these illegal operations,”
Internet search engines claim to protect consumers by verifying the legitimacy of an online drug advertiser using PharmacyChecker.com’
“It is obvious that the existing policies and safeguards Internet search engines have in place do not work,” said Bryan A. Liang, Ph.D., M.D., J.D., executive director of the Institute of Health Law Studies and vice president of PSM. “As we discovered in our work, neither search engines nor PharmacyChecker.com are being held accountable for clear violations of state and federal laws, as well as their own requirements, despite being on notice that illicit sales are occurring. No one should be able to purchase prescription drugs, including controlled substances, over the Internet without a valid prescription and physician oversight. But as long as search engines are not held accountable for the profits they make off sponsored ads placed by illegal online pharmacies, this dangerous practice will continue.”
As the problem of counterfeit drugs continues to grow across the globe, especially through online pharmacies, PSM believes steps must be taken in order to limit their distribution and sale.
“Unless the online pharmacy is licensed through a national Internet pharmacy licensing program such as VIPPS, selling drugs via the Internet should be illegal,” continued Dr. Liang. “We need new legislation that prohibits financial transactions for drug sales of unlicensed online pharmacies and creates substantive criminal penalties for any party, including Web sites and search engines, who engage in illegal sale of contraband or counterfeit drugs.”
