The Ryan Haight Bill--named after an 18-year-old who died from an overdose of Vicodin purchased online in 2001--would make it illegal to sell prescription drugs online without proof of a prescription issued to the patient in person by a doctor.
"Those who sell prescription drugs online without a valid prescription are operating illegally, undercutting the laws that were put in place to protect patients, and are thereby endangering the public health, " said Victoria Espinel, US intellectual property enforcement co-ordinator, in a statement.
"This suggests that Google is profiting from advertisements for illegal sales of controlled prescription drugs online, " wrote Joseph Califano, CASA's founder and chairman and a former U.S. health secretary.
By sifting through 60 million spam emails for mentions of six major drug brands and following the Web links included in those messages, researchers found numbers implying a three-fold spike in prescription drugs sold online.
The UK medical newspaper GP reported that 33% of the 423 doctors it surveyed said that they had treated, or suspect they had treated, a patient for the side-effects of substandard prescription only drugs purchased online.
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Some sites even protect their sales of prescription drugs by offering "online prescriptions, " ostensibly provided by a resident doctor, a practice that makes proving their illegality even tougher.
Although data shows the use of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin has trailed off in recent years, the abuse of prescription drugs, particularly by children, and many freely available online, has soared.
The proposal would give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory oversight of online prescription sales as well as the authority to impose fines upon sites illegally selling drugs like Viagra and Valium.
Amtech pointed out in a research note that a test Google search of each of the top 10 best-selling prescription drugs at that time turned up a slew of ads for Canadian online drug peddlers like CanadaDrugPharmacy.com and CanadaDrugCenter.com.
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Those results echo another study released in July: The European Alliance for Access to Safe Medicines found that 62% of drugs sold online were fake or substandard and that 96% of the sites operated illegally, displaying fake certifications or distributing prescription drugs without a prescription.
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