For someone who believes that Donald Trump’s actions, especially recent ones, have threatened the core of our democracy, it’s difficult to admit that the Twitter ban against him strikes a nerve with me. Getting right to the point: in the summer of 2018, Instagram shut down PharmacyChecker’s account. PharmacyChecker, which I co-founded in 2002, is a small, independently-funded online pharmacy verification and drug price comparison website. One of its claims to fame is providing information for consumers that can help them safely obtain lower-cost prescription drugs from other countries. PharmacyChecker helps people avoid rogue pharmacy websites and save money. So why did Instagram shut it down?
Germane to the matter is the fact that under most circumstances federal law prohibits the importation of prescription drugs for personal use. However, federal law makes many allowances to permit it anyway, despite the prohibitions. Tens of millions of Americans have imported medicines for personal use and none have been prosecuted for doing so. PharmacyChecker does not import, sell, distribute, process orders for medication in any way. It provides information. That information may be controversial but it’s not illegal. Nonetheless, it poses a threat to the pharmaceutical industry, which needs Americans to pay the highest prices on drugs to maintain their incredible profit margins. You see where this goes.
The company Blink Health is advertising Canadian drugs on
Google, even though it does not sell medication from Canadian pharmacies. Should
the company do that? Is that false advertising?
Blink Health advertising under the key phrase “drug prices in Canada”
Launched
in early 2016, Blink Health offers consumers the ability to purchase
prescription medicines from its app or website and pick them up from local
pharmacies in their neighborhoods. This distinguishes them other drug price
comparison leaders that offer pharmacy discount cards and coupons for U.S.
pharmacies – ours is called the PharmacyChecker
Discount Card. Since Blink Health’s launch, several similar services have
sprouted, most notably Capsule,
which launched in my hometown.
As I understand it, the firm’s goal is to find and increase
discounts as it develops greater buying power through greater volumes, also
known as economies of scale. I like it and it’s my hope – and belief – that Blink
Health is saving people money on their generics. So, hats off to you, Blink
Health.
But it’s kind of aggravating that, as I see it, Blink Health is fooling consumers who are looking for lower cost prescription drugs from Canada who will likely not get what they’re looking for when they click that ad. Brand drugs cost way more at Blink Health than in Canada.
Left to Right: Ron Andruff, Aria Ilyad Ahmad, Oki (Okiomiteni) Joy Olufuye, Gabriel Levitt.
I’m writing to you from Berlin, Germany on Thanksgiving and I’m missing my family. But it was important to be here. I came to attend and participate at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF). At the IGF, people from all over the world delve into an assortment of internet issues that impact the lives of people everywhere. Very broadly, the topics covered related to free speech, privacy, competition, security, child safety, nationalism, protecting democratic elections, and the reason I was here: discussing and promoting access to safe and affordable medicine on the Internet. Attendees and participants are affiliated with international governmental organizations, national governments, non-profit organizations, activists, businesses, journalists, and a wide array of policy professionals focused on internet governance.
What is internet governance? I like this definition from Georgia Tech School of Public Policy:
“Internet governance refers to the rules, policies, standards and practices that coordinate and shape global cyberspace.”
One of the Sustainable Development Goals, 3.8, created under UN auspices is: “Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.” Lower-income countries where majorities of citizens can’t afford basic healthcare are deserving of our urgent and generous help, but the pain and anguish faced by American families where people are dying because they can’t afford medicine must also be addressed.
Online access
to safe and affordable imported medicine can improve and even saves lives
of those who can’t afford medicine where they live. This is particularly the
case in the United States, where over 30 million people have no health
insurance at all, and approximately 87 million are not adequately insured [Commonwealth
Fund, 2019].
Organized under the support of the World Health Organization
(WHO), as part of the effort to achieve global healthcare goals, twelve
multilateral global health and development organizations are seeking public
comments to help them develop their “Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives
and Well-being for All.” My comment is below.
Until we lower drug prices here at home in America, online access
to affordable medication internationally is clearly essential. But what if we
lived in a country where people were no longer able to find safe international
options online?
In an ideal world, search algorithms empower consumers to
find the exact information they are looking for on these search engines. In a
recent Google algorithm update (March 2019), which affected the “natural” or
“organic,” non-paid search results, we wonder if there was foul play involved
in which Google was caving in
to Big Pharma. The Electronic Frontier Foundation identified this problem
in 2016, in “How
Big Pharma’s Shadow Regulation Censors the Internet.”
The results at the very top of your Google search are often ads, which are of course paid placement: a different problem.
Those patients searching on Google for information about affording medicine through online pharmacies were significantly disadvantaged by the Google March 2019 Core Update. The reason is that results for PharmacyChecker ‘s verification and pricing information are now much harder to find than they were on March 11th, 2019— a day before the update.
According to a new study published by the American Enterprise Institute, the search engine Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, has added pop-up warnings to search results that increase the chances that web searchers will click to rogue online pharmacies. As the reports shows, Bing’s action appears to purposefully thwart safe personal importation of more affordable medicines. It is one of the clearest examples of censorship resulting from “voluntary agreements” among Internet companies, “encouraged” by regulators, that will threaten the health of patients buying medicine online under the guise of protecting them. Bing has placed warnings on its organic search results of Canadian-based and other international online pharmacies, yet the search engine fails to do so for many rogue websites, ones proven to sell counterfeit drugs. Here’s how that happened.
The problem is Bing’s use of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy’s (NABP) Not Recommended List (NRL). Many of the NABP’s programs involving online sales of medicines and educating the public about online pharmacies are funded by drug companies, and therefore supportive of the industry’s profit-protecting goals against importation.
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A source for news and analysis about drug prices and safety, online pharmacies and personal drug importation, published on behalf of American consumers.
