Department of Justice spokesman told us, a federal jury in Alabama indicted the operators of a web site called the Norfolk Men’s Clinic on a series of charges, including writing phony prescriptions and charging consumers for medical consultations that they allege never occurred. The case has yet to go to trial.
All of this reinforces the need for doctors to see that people are who they say they are and to ascertain, through an exam, whether patients have a condition that could make taking certain medications a fatal error. Incomplete instructions. When you fill a prescription at a legitimate venue, you receive a pharmacist’s printout of instructions and warnings. Only two of the rogue pharmacies from which we ordered sent such a printout. Once, the information was not even correct: Zyban, the antismoking drug, came with instructions for taking Viagra Sildenafil. The rest left us to learn about dosage and side effects from the box itself and from the manufacturer’s fine-print information sheet that comes with any drug. Questionable quality. We ordered four drugs — Fosamax, Zithromax, Prozac, and Renova (tretinoin, an antiaging cream) — from an online pharmacy with no address. The shipment arrived in an unmarked brown envelope with a return post office box labeled Bangkok, Thailand.
The boxes containing the medicines were somewhat squashed and looked as if they’d already been opened. Nowhere was there any indication of the patient’s name. Moreover, government officials warn that the drugs sold by rogue foreign sites could be contaminated, counterfeit, or outdated, or could have been stored improperly. Loss of privacy. Some sites have no stated policy about privacy, security, or confidentiality: Customers can’t tell what happens to the medical and credit-card data they provide. Even sites that promise to keep such information private may not, says the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Last summer , the agency settled various claims against a group of pharmacies doing business under several web addresses including worldwidemedicine.com and focusmedical.com. The sites claimed that sensitive information could be viewed only by authorized people because it was encrypted. It wasn’t. Moreover, according to the FTC, the site operators planned to provide customers’ credit-card numbers to a third party, which was going to try to bill those customers for work needed to make the web sites Y2K compliant. Without admitting wrongdoing, the sites agreed to disclose more information about their operations and about the doctors who prescribe.
Reporter Marks wondered about the privacy of his orders after receiving unsolicited e-mails promoting hard-core sex sites. Lack of accountability. Because they’re not licensed to dispense drugs or because they do so in a way that violates the law, operators of rogue sites don’t usually divulge critical information about their operation: their owners’ names; their location; and the names, qualifications, and specialties of their consulting doctors. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to contact a prescribing doctor.