Posted on: Thursday, June 17, 2004
Online pharmacies shipped fake drugs to U.S., report says
By Kerry Dooley
Bloomberg News
WASHINGTON — Internet pharmacies outside the United States and Canada shipped fake versions of Pfizer Inc.'s Viagra impotence drug, Roche Holdings AG's Accutane acne treatment and Purdue Pharma Inc.'s OxyContin painkiller to the United States, a test by the investigative arm of Congress showed.
Orders from 68 pharmacies in the United States, Canada and 10 other countries also showed that 45 sold prescription drugs without requiring a prescription from a patient, and four shipped medications with improper packaging, according to a report by Congress's General Accounting Office. An unspecified number improperly sent medicines that require monitoring by a doctor, the study found.
"We observed questionable characteristics and business practices of some of the Internet pharmacies from which we received drugs," the GAO report said. "Most, but not all, involved other foreign pharmacies" outside of Canada and the United States.
Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., ordered the test as part of an inquiry into the safety of imported drugs. An investigation panel he heads is to hold hearings on the issue.
Coleman supports one of three Senate proposals that would enable Americans to buy drugs legally from countries that set prices lower than in the United States.
Washington-based AARP, the largest lobbying group for seniors, said yesterday that it plans to mobilize its 36 million members to overcome opposition by pharmaceutical companies to such drug imports.
U.S. consumers spent more than $1 billion last year on medicines from Canada, where regulations keep prices as much as 70 percent below those in the United States.
States such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Iowa and Illinois are studying ways to reduce drug spending by purchasing drugs from Canada. Springfield, Mass., said it saved $2.8 million in the past year by buying from Canada for its workers and pensioners.
In April, the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services told three Canadian Internet pharmacies that they violated terms of an agreement to ship only U.S.-approved drugs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said yesterday. The medicines had been approved in Canada.
Speakers at today's Senate subcommittee hearing will include Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. His firm, Giuliani Partners LLC, has been retained by the Washington-based industry lobbying group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to evaluate the risks of importing medicines from Canada and other countries. GAO officials also will testify.
In its report, the congressional accounting office said it found that 16 of 18 drugs that investigators bought from Canadian pharmacies weren't approved for sale in the United States. All of them were chemically comparable, the report said.
Investigators also obtained drugs from Argentina, Costa Rica, Fiji, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Spain, Thailand and Turkey.
"The process of obtaining a drug from many of these pharmacies involved only selecting the desired medication and submitting the necessary billing and shipping information," the report said. "It is notable that we identified these numerous problems despite the relatively small number of drugs we purchased."
