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Internet Drug Sales DangerousA
study to be published in the December 1999 issue of the Annals of Internal
Medicine, Internet
Availability of Prescription Pharmaceuticals to the Public , addresses the
growing dangerous practice of purchasing prescription drugs through the
internet. The study conducted by
Bernard S. Bloom, PhD, and Ronald C. Iannacone, BS at the Department of
Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, not only addresses the danger of
purchasing drugs over the Internet but also discussed the economic disadvantage
for consumers to do so. The
conclusions of the study showed that prescription drugs purchased online were on
average more expensive that those purchased in traditional ways.
The study also showed that many sites that sold such drugs had no
prescription requirements or relaxed requirements that amounted to not much more
than and online questionnaire. The
most popular drugs sold online are Viagra, Propecia, Prozac, weight loss pills,
birth control pills, and smoking cessation pills.
One concern expressed by the authors of the study was the quality of
these medications. Since several of
the sites were from outside North America, the authors suggested that the
strength or purity of the medications could be compromised. Part
of the rise in drug sales on the Internet could well be due to the increase in
advertising geared directly to consumers by the major drug companies.
In an article published in the September 25th 1999 British
Medical Journal, it is reported that U.S. drug companies spend more than one
billion dollars per year on advertising aimed directly to the public.
This advertising and the easy availability of drugs on the Internet may
account for the dramatic rise in drug sales over the last several years. The
January 7, 1999 New England Journal of Medicine reported that prescription drug
usage increased by 14.1 percent in 1997 alone.
These daunting figures should be tempered by a report in the Journal of
the American Medical Association addressing the subject of unintended
side-effects of properly prescribed, properly administered medications. The
authors of this article estimate deaths from properly prescribed medications to
exceed 106,000 deaths per year. With
these numbers so high one can only speculate with concern what the increase in
death rate will be from self medication over the Internet. |