Working in association with the U.S. Department of Justice and INTERPOL, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just managed to shut down nearly 1,700 illegal pharmacy web sites and confiscate some $40 million worth of illegal medicines. So …
If you go to a web site from which you have been buying sildenafil (Viagra) or other drugs at what seemed like really, really good prices, and you find that the web site now opens to a page that looks like this
then you may well have been paying good money to buy bad products — i.e., product or products that did not actually contain the therapeutic agent you thought you were getting — and you are certainly going to need to find a new source for your drug(s).
Unfortunately there are lot of illegal on-line pharmacies (either within the USA or operating from outside the USA but selling product into the USA) that sell actually or potentially dangerous products to consumers who think they are getting “the real thing.” Commonly, they aren’t. And many of these on-line drug stores do need to get shut down!
Of course there are also a lot of good, high-quality on-line pharmacies that provide good, high-quality, approved products to their customers too. What The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink can tell you with absolute certainty is that (a) if you don’t have to provide a prescription to buy a prescription drug over the Internet, you almost certainly are not getting a safe and effective product and (b) if the price looks “too good to be true” then it almost certainly is too good to be true!
There is a fine American tradition of believing that government agencies like the FDA spend their entire time trying to stop people doing things that “freedom” should allow them to do. While our federal and state governments may often implement laws and processes that look completely daft to us as individuals, it is worth remembering that sometimes they do what they do to try to help save people’s lives!
If you want to read more about the FDA’s actions in shutting down these pharmacies, just click here to read the article in The Washington Post or you can also look at information about how to pick a good, legal on-line pharmacy by clicking on the BeSafeRx page on the FDA’s own web site. According to the story in The Washington Post,
A January study by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which accredits online pharmacies, found that only 257 of 10,275 online pharmacy sites it examined appeared legitimate.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: FDA, on-line, pharmacy |
THE "NEW" PROSTATE CANCER INFOLINK 
When it is noted that they have “shuttered” nearly 1,700 apparently illegal pharmacies worldwide, it obvious — and somewhat surprising — that there are that many. On the other hand, several pharmaceuticals outside the U.S. are the very facilities to which U.S. patent holders outsource their product for manufacture, and in some countries — India for example — I’ve read the government there has authorized their pharmaceuticals manufacturing for U.S. companies to do their own sales with the provision they change at least one of the non-active ingredients so that their product is not an exact reproduction. Of interest is that dutasteride/Avodart is produced in France and bicalutamide, generic of Casodex, has been approved for outsourcing to several foreign pharmaceuticals.
Do any readers have recommendations from an out-of-country pharmacy source? I recently had RALP (robotic) and my Medicare Part D won’t cover ED drugs. I’m appealing but don’t have much hope. Otherwise I’ll be paying about $30 per dose.
Dear Chuck:
I think you are confusing the activities of pharmacies (that sell products to consumers) with thos of manufacturers (that manufacture products and sell them to distributors, which may include large pharmacy chains).
Incidentally, my understanding is that there may be as many as 6,000+ on-line pharmacies.
Dear Dick:
I feel that I should point out that it is actually illegal to import drugs into America from abroad (except under certain exceptional circumstances).