by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Aug 31, 2018 | FDA enforcement
The FDA is warning 21 online pharmacies to stop selling certain prescription opioid drugs to people in the U.S.
According to the FDA, the 21 websites at issue are operated by four separate networks:
CoinRx,
PharmacyAffiliates.org,
PharmaMedics,
and MedInc.biz.
Each network received a similar warning letter from the FDA, which singles out their alleged illegal sales of unapproved and misbranded tramadol, also noting that a prescription was not required.
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Tagged with: Enforcement, fentanyl, opioids, tramadol, warning letters
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Aug 9, 2018 | FDA enforcement
The FDA has made it it’s business to shine a bright light on the evils of illegal fentanyl imports, which are sometimes sold online. That focus seems like it’s a good one. Illegal fentanyl imports get into the hands of drug dealers who use the ingredients to make counterfeit, opioid-based drugs. They sell them to addicts who too often overdose and die. I’ve written a lot about the FDA’s crackdown on illegal fentanyl imports being misused to stop imports of prescription medicines on their way to American patients from Canada and other countries. However, something much more troubling actually has gone down over the past few years.
According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the FDA ignored information about off-label prescribing of the most dangerous prescription opioid drugs: fast-acting fentanyl or transmucosal immediate release fentanyl (TIRF). Those drugs were approved to treat the most serious pain experienced by cancer patients. Instead, drug companies encouraged off-label prescribing for patients experiencing lower levels of pain and certainly did not have terminal illnesses.
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Tagged with: Enforcement, fentanyl, opioids
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Aug 1, 2018 | Drug Importation
Here’s a real story about online opioid drug dealers getting indicted and how pharma front groups conflate the opioid crisis with prescription drug importation. I write “real” to juxtapose rogue online pharmacies—that illegally sell addictive drugs—and safe international online pharmacies that don’t sell addictive drugs at all.
On July 9th, the U.S. Department of Justice for the Southern State of New York announced the indictment of Evelin Bracy and Jorge Rodriguez Lopez for illegal distribution of controlled drugs, including an analog of the opioid pharmaceutical Fentanyl – called U-47700. They are also accused of selling these drugs on the Internet from what the DOJ refers to as a website “purporting to be an online pharmacy.” The indicted parties were also alleged to have sold drugs under pharmaceutical names, oxycodone and alprazolam, that were found to have other ingredients, implying that the products were counterfeit. These counts can technically land a person in jail for 40 years.
If the allegations are true, then we’re dealing with bona fide drug pushers. The Partnership for Safe Medicines (PSM), a Pharma-funded non-profit group that seeks to conflate such drug dealing and counterfeiting with pharmacies in other countries that sell affordable prescription medicines to people here in the U.S. PSM is keeping a web diary of law enforcement busts that help stop the deadly fentanyl trade, which is taking the lives of thousands of Americans each year. We applaud law enforcement for disrupting these opioid dealing operations and bringing their orchestrators to justice.
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Tagged with: Enforcement, opioids
