Online Pharmacies: Drug Dealers on the Net

Online pharmacies have become a source of prescription drug abuse.

Rogue online pharmacies provide controlled substances to individuals who either abuse the drugs themselves or sell them to others.

If you have an email account, in the last several years you've undoubtedly been spammed by somebody offering controlled substances without the control. Some of these are -- not all of them are frauds. Some of them are real. In calendar year 2006, just 34 known or suspected rogue Internet pharmacies dispensed over 98 million dosage units of hydrocodone, all of which was diverted.

The maximum amount of legitimate prescriptions, on average nationwide, is about eight pills per day.

Therefore, these 34 pharmacies dispensed enough hydrocodone to supply over 410,000 patients for a month.

The average pharmacy dispenses about 88,000 dosage units of hydrocodone. Therefore, it would take the entire annual sales of hydrocodone from 1,118 pharmacies to equal the amount dispensed by just these 34 rogue Internet pharmacies. The damage can be done on a wide scale, in other words, by a relatively small number of criminal actors here.

As was previously noted, prescription drug abuse has emerged as the fastest growing drug threat, requiring a concerted response from every sector of our society. In 2006, the latest year for which data are available, past-year initiation of prescription drugs exceeded that of marijuana. Abuse of prescription drugs among 12 and 13 year-olds now exceeds marijuana use, and among 18 to 25 year-olds, it has increased 17 percent over the past 3 years.

John Walters, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy