Online Pharmacies, Personal Drug Importation, and the Public Health: History of Online Pharmacies
On February 12th of this year, we sent a comprehensive report about buying medication online to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Our purpose was to correct the public record by challenging a flawed report about Internet pharmacies written by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) back in 2013. The GAO’s report essentially parroted the narrative that the pharmaceutical companies, U.S. pharmacies, and FDA want you to hear, which ignores the existence of safe international online pharmacies that help Americans afford safe medication. Due to the incredible importance of this issue, we are publishing a section of our report each week. For the full report, click Online Pharmacies, Personal Drug Importation and the Public Health.
This week you can read a “History of Online Pharmacies.” It’s not a comprehensive history but gives the reader enough background to digest the larger issues contained in the report. When you think about, online pharmacies are really “mail order pharmacies” with websites. Did you know that mail order pharmacy has been around for well over a hundred years?
The Internet has facilitated a major proliferation of mail-order pharmacy operations. Mail-order pharmacies are not new; they have served Americans since the late 1800s. Internet pharmacies, often referred to as “online pharmacies,” can be defined as websites that market and sell prescription medication over the Internet that is dispensed by mail-order. When they began operating in the mid to late 1990s, online pharmacies quickly became a subject of concern for federal regulators and Congress due to dangerous and illicit practices. The NABP created the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS) in 1999, a voluntary program open to domestic pharmacies to help consumers identify safe online pharmacies.
Drugstore.com, which launched its website in 1999, was considered a first-mover in the industry and an example of a safe online pharmacy without a bricks-and-mortar presence. It required a valid prescription and dispensed medication from a licensed pharmacy. By the beginning of the last decade, most major chain pharmacies were doing business online by taking new and refill prescription orders, and mailing them across the country. Drugstore.com and most but not all online pharmacies associated with major chain pharmacies and Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) companies became VIPPS-approved by 2003.
Around 2000, Canadian pharmacies began online marketing to reach American consumers, which provided Americans with access to low-priced drugs. Previously, personal drug importation from Canada was relegated to those living on border-states. This issue also gained public attention through media coverage of bus trips, which brought seniors up to Canada to buy medication and were sometimes sponsored by U.S. politicians supportive of reforming drug importation laws. Canadian pharmacies later began partnering with licensed pharmacies in other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and later India and Turkey, as well as those in free trade zones. They did so in part to evade supply restrictions imposed by pharmaceutical companies against Canadian pharmacies, but also to take advantage of even lower drug prices found elsewhere and to increase profits.
In 2002, PharmacyChecker.com began operations to verify both U.S. and foreign online pharmacies – as well as to compare drug prices for consumers seeking the lowest prices for their medications. CIPA was founded that same year. CIPA’s vice president testified at a congressional hearing in 2003 entitled: “International Prescription Drug Parity: Are Americans Being Protected or Gouged?” In 2004, the FDA recognized PharmacyChecker.com’s efforts to help consumers find the lowest prices and directed people to www.pharmacychecker.com as part of media relations efforts to show that U.S. generic drug prices are lower in the U.S. than in Canada.
While the Internet has enabled millions of Americans to find safe and lower cost medication from outside the U.S., it has also created a public health minefield where dangerous websites posing as safe pharmacies, U.S. and foreign, are accessed every day. Such websites sell fake, adulterated and/or low quality medication, or genuine and safe prescription drugs but without requiring a prescription. These rogue online pharmacies are a serious threat to patient safety and have caused sickness and death.
While too many Americans today have online access to and buy from rogue foreign pharmacies, many are benefiting from safe foreign pharmacies. Americans, including elected officials and public health regulators, know that low-priced and safe prescription medication can be found online internationally. For instance, former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius adopted a personal drug importation program when she was Governor of Kansas that allowed consumers to find international pharmacies over the Internet. The State of Maine recently updated its pharmacy licensure requirements to permit sales from pharmacies that are licensed in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, in effect abolishing state restrictions on personal drug imports from those countries.
