FDA cracks down on thousands of websites for selling bad drugs | Hacker News Reader

FDA cracks down on thousands of websites for selling bad drugs

reuters.com

16 pointstocomment14 comments

Title is incorrect. There is no evidence presented anywhere that any of the drugs were "bad". According to the article, the FDA has claimed that they were "potentially" fake, meaning that they didn't even try to verify that anything was actually fake, or couldn't find anything that was actually fake. If they'd actually verified something as fake, the article would've said so, unless you think they'd fail to boast about that.

Clearly the Internet is now teaming up with Canadians to poison our drugs.

> 18,000 illegal pharmacy websites and the seizure of $10.5 million worth of drugs

What a fail... $583 in drugs per "illegal" website shutdown. I really don't like the US being the world police and it seems like they always do so on behalf of giant US based corporations (MegaUpload comes to mind, the counterfeit jersey bust, etc). Very dangerous territory.

Update: In other news, the DOJ announced a huge bust on Medicare fraud today to the tune of $430 million (and all that fraud is from just 91 people!). This is a real crime and it actually costs taxpayers money instead of the theoretical losses of a US based company.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/October/12-ag-1205.html

Those numbers are independent. Dividing the value of drugs over number of website shutdowns is a misleading stat. They made domain seizures for most of the takedowns. I'm guessing the drugs were taken from a few major players.

$10M in seizures for a worldwide bust is ridiculously not news worthy. This is at "street" value too, which for Viagra is around $10 a pill and for Tamiflu is a cool $50-100 per pack.

To put it into context, a decently large cocaine bust these days is "worth" orders of magnitude more.

These drugs have been legally sold and manufactured in many countries. The use of the word "illegal" to describe them is hysterical and inappropriate. If the FDA wishes to regulate pharmaceuticals that enter the United States, that's fine; but the FDA's jurisdiction should stop at its borders. It looks to me like this crack-down had little to do with health and safety but a lot to do with protecting entrenched distributors.

Control over the supply chain is what stops fake drugs from reaching consumers. A few months back a number of vials, purported to contain a cancer drug, were found to be nothing but solution of saline.

If anything, you're going to see many more actions like this, the FDA is scared about the integrity of the drug supply (and apparently so are many other countries, based on the article).

A lot of these drugs were almost certainly made by competent, regulated pharmaceutical manufacturing firms in countries such as India. The FDA doesn't care - if it's not manufactured in FDA-approved plants they treat it just like they would a total fake, even if it's manufactured using the same methods and to the same standards as the genuine article, and they'll shut down any company that tries to sell them.

I don't disagree with your comment at all. However, I think the FDA's approach is "The easiest way to control unsafe drugs is to assume that anything that didn't come through approved supply channels is a fake."

It's a harsh way of approaching the problem, but you need to remember that the FDA suffers far worse when someone is harmed by a fake drug than if it seizes drugs that are safe.

Action taken between September 25 and October 2 resulted in the shutdown of more than 18,000 illegal pharmacy websites

I wonder if this means that 18,000 domain names were seized. And, I'd also love to see the list, given that the US has a tendency to add a few pet project domains to these seizure-fests.

I own the website drugcite.com, I instantly checked it after reading your comment. Seizures of this size really scare me for false positive reasons

Give the people what they want! Dangerous drugs like nicotine and alcohol are readily-available to most citizens. Whereas, pain medications and stimulants are so tightly controlled that they drive honest people to the Internet to obtain the drugs they can't afford or their doctors are afraid to prescribe.

Original PR from the FDA: http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/uc...

Looks like most of the sites are being shut down through domain registrars.

This is very good news for those of us that are actually looking to start a legitimate online pharmacy.

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