BANGKOK (AP) – Nearly all of the world’s 35,000 online pharmacies are being run illegally and consumers who use them risk getting ineffective or dangerous drugs, according to the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) annual report on “notorious markets”. The report also singled out 19 countries over concerns about counterfeit or pirated products.
The report also named about three dozen online retailers, many of them in China or elsewhere in Asia that it said are allegedly engaged in selling counterfeit products or other illegal activities.
The report says 96 per cent of online pharmacies were found to be violating the law, many operating without a license and selling medicines without prescriptions and safety warnings.
Their websites often look like legitimate e-commerce platforms, often with false claims that they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said the report, released on Wednesday. The FDA and United States (US) Drug Enforcement Administration have both issued warnings about risks of buying prescription medicines from such sources.
It cited a survey by the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies’ Global Foundation that found nearly one in four Americans who have used online pharmacies reported having encountered substandard, fake or harmful medicines.
Last year, Federal prosecutors reported that a network of illegal drug sellers based in the US, the Dominican Republic and India had packaged potentially deadly synthetic opioids into pills disguised as common prescription drugs and sold millions of them through fake online drugstores, federal prosecutors said on Monday. At least nine people died of narcotics poisoning between August 2023 and June 2024 after consuming the counterfeit pills, the indictment said.
