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Comment by paulluuk | Hacker News Reader

I order plenty of things online (From other countries) and other than having to wait a week, it's trivially easy. Is it that much different when it's medicinal products?

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You mean why would it be risky to ingest substances into your body from an untrusted source? I think that question answers itself.

A while back I grabbed a topical corticosteroid cream from an indian subsidiary of an American pharmaceutical company because it was cheaper, faster, and easier than a dermatologist visit. It's often not a shady no-name manufacturer. Some guys in the bodybuilding world will get their steroids through Bayer's turkish subsidiary. Etc.

> steroids

I don’t knot that steroids is a good example to support your case. Anabolic steroids are classified as Schedule III controlled substances under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in the United States.

Correct, my point is that you often wind up purchasing overseas from foreign subsidiaries of the same companies that make the prescribed and dispensed stuff here. You're still purchasing and using pharmaceutical-grade. The legal question is separate.

A large amount of pharmaceutical ingredients come out of China, and are safely used in American drugs approved, inspected, and tested [hopefully] by FDA. For those supply chains that are supposedly well regulated there's less risk than just purchasing from some unknown/untrusted entity that also happens to be in China, who might have put in all kinds of impurities or even poisons either by accident or on purpose.

Maybe this is a very european sentiment, but I "trust" an italian or german pharma lab just as much as a dutch or american one.

True, the main country who has proven itself to be untrustworthy and doing it's best to covertly poison America and the West in general is...you guessed it... China.

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