Tuesday, October 21, 2003

A Vast Unregulated Shadow Market: U.S. Prescription Drug System Under Attack
A Sunday, October 19 story in the Washington Post, the first of a five part series, "Pharmaceutical Roulette" - "For half a century Americans could boast of the world's safest, most tightly regulated system for distributing prescription drugs. But now that system is undercut by a growing illegal trade in pharmaceuticals, fed by criminal profiteers, unscrupulous wholesalers, rogue Internet sites and foreign pharmacies. In the past few years, middlemen have siphoned off growing numbers of popular and lifesaving drugs and diverted them into a multibillion-dollar shadow market. Crooks have introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the mainstream drug chain. Fast-moving operators have hawked millions of doses of narcotics over the Internet. The result too often is pharmaceutical roulette for millions of unsuspecting Americans..." See also the related stories Drugs in short supply: higher prices, more compromises, Internet Trafficking in Narcotics Has Surged (part 2 of the series) and Doctors medicate strangers on web (part 3). You can locate other related stories to be published later this week through a page indexing the entire special report.