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.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    dorpus, 20 Oct 2003 @ 1:01am

    Finite supply of prescription authority

    There's only so many MD's, NP's, etc. who have current legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. The people who write prescriptions for profit are easy to track down and expel. It's really good news of sorts, to help weed out unethical health professionals.

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.