How Online Drug Trafficking Works

from the follow-the-money dept

The Washington Post has an investigative piece looking at how online drug trafficking works, focusing on a series of sites that sell a ridiculous number of controlled painkillers, often with the help of doctors who agree to write prescriptions for customers after a quick phone call, where nothing of importance is actually discussed. The thing that's most scary in reading the article is how powerless authorities seem to be in stopping these operations from going up. They talk about how, with certain operations, they know exactly what's going on and which convicted scammers are behind it, but as the law currently stands, they still need to approve their pharmacy applications and can do very little to stop them from selling drugs online. In a side piece, the Post looks at a bunch of online pharmacies that have been shut down, but as the original article points out - for each site shut down, two or three new ones open up. The doctors involved do it for the money (and sometimes have a drug abuse problem themselves). The reporters confront one doctor who claims that he's only helping people who really need the drugs - even though the reporters show him one story where he prescribed over 2,000 pills over a five month period to five different people - all supposedly living in the same house.