7 ms·

Amazon’s Illegal Drugs: Steroids, Muscle Relaxants, Prescription Antibiotics

53 points by tehrania 12y ago

epochwolf 12y ago
Nothing surprising in this. People are using an automated online marketplace to sell illegal goods. Online marketplace takes down products when they are reported. It's a game of whack-a-mole and Amazon is doing the bare minimum. The company has no incentive to do otherwise.
- y4mi 12y ago
  until someone dies because of a drug sold through their website and the surviving family members feed the media a horror story with which they can create the black sheep, amazon, which profits from the deaths of its customers
  - bronson 12y ago
    If people don't care about all the doctors currently overprescribing oxy, xanax, etc, seems like they shouldn't care too much about this.
    - codezero 12y ago
      Most of those people are still under a doctor's care, so while they may not need the medication that much and may pay the price later, there is at least some accounting/supervision going on. When/if someone dies in a case of overprescription, there is clearly someone to be held accountable. A possibly overly sensational case of this is Michael Jackson's doctor who was found guilty of manslaughter. When you self prescribe foreign prescription medication, and die/suffer some massive side effect, there's no real recourse.
- aestra 12y ago
  Ebay actually has automatic flagging to keep illegal products off their site. I know this because I once tried to sell a pulse oximetry meter there and it got autoflagged and taken down. Apparently you can't sell (some?) medical supplies on ebay even though I bought the pulse ox meter from the store.
nhangen 12y ago
I have zero problem with this. The day doctors sold out and started accepting bribes from pharma reps is the day that I stopped trusting them, and I certainly don't care what they think as it relates to steroids, pain killers, and antibiotics. These are drug dealers complaining that they are being circumvented. Boo hoo.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  I have quite a bit of a problem with people ordering antibiotics, and breeding antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains both inside their bodies, and in our sewers once they feel better and flush the rest of the pills.
  - crazy1van 12y ago
    So instead they should go to the their local doctor, pay their $15 co-pay and then take their antibiotics. Come on, we all know that if you have insurance and see your doctor with the sniffles, you can leave with a antibiotic prescription if you want. I'm not defending the illegal online drug markets, but the problem of resistant germs is a much bigger problem and it has nothing to do with Amazon resellers.
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      I agree that it's a bigger problem, but I believe this will make it significantly worse. Right now, you have to go to a doctor and get a prescription - if you don't have a bacterial infection, or aren't likely to get one (e.g., post-oral-surgery stuff) they won't prescribe you the antibiotics. If it's possible to buy it on amazon, people will end up 'abusing' them to try and treat non-bacterial infections.
      - Phlarp 12y ago
        Doctors throw antibiotics at viral infections as a placebo cure _all_ the time. Neither that activity nor these Amazon resellers make a dent in antibiotic use when compared to factory farms and traditional cattle operations. Like it or not, antibiotics are a staple in the diets of a large majority of this country's mammalian population
userbinator 12y ago
Note that "illegal" is always relative - there are many drugs that are prescription-only in some countries but available freely in others, illegal in some and not in others, etc.
- CanSpice 12y ago
  So? What does that have to do with anything? It's illegal in the United States to import these drugs into the United States. Amazon is based in the United States. What does it matter if they're legal or not in any other country? This story is all about importing these drugs into the United States.
  - ars 12y ago
    > What does it matter if they're legal or not in any other country? From a legal point of view? None. From a moral? Not so simple. A lot of drugs are prescription only in the US for really no reason whatsoever. Two examples are Nystatin and Mebendazole. I even emailed the FDA about Nystatin and they said that to become OTC it would need a sponsor, which is a stupid reason to leave them prescription only.
    - refurb 12y ago
      For a drug to make the switch from Rx to OTC, you need to prove a lot of things. Can consumers understand how to correctly diagnosis the disease it treats? Can consumers correctly dose themselves? Will consumers knows when to stop treatment and seek professional help. You have to remember that not everyone follows directions or uses medications correctly. I don't blame the FDA for not making a drug OTC unless they can prove it will be used safely.
      - ars 12y ago
        Both those drugs are very easy to use. For Nystatin: Does your baby have a rash that looks like raised red dots? For Mebendazole: Did you drink or come in contact with potentially infected water? There are plenty of OTC drugs with far more complicated symptoms. It's really completely arbitrary - or more accurately, it's driven by companies wanting to expand their market into OTC (as soon as it goes off patent) rather than anything actually medical. Take Nexium for example: It was prescription only (and very expensive) till the patent ended. The day the patent expired it turned OTC.
KerrickStaley 12y ago
I got some topical clindamycin over-the-counter when I was in Thailand, and it worked better than any other acne drug I had tried. I couldn't find it in any pharmacies after returning to the US, however. I emailed the FDA about it, and they responded: Clindamycin is an antibiotic, whereas benzoyl peroxide is not. Necessary characteristics for OTC drugs include an acceptable safety margin, low misuse and abuse potential, and adequate labeling. In addition, consumers must be able to self-diagnose, self-select the medication [self-selection is the decision a consumer makes to use or not to use a drug product based on reading the information on the drug product label and applying knowledge of his or her personal medical history], self-treat and self-manage the condition for which the OTC drug is intended, and additionally, a health care practitioner is not needed for the safe and effective use of the product. An OTC drug is considered to be safe and effective for use by the general public without a prescriber's authorization. At this point in time, FDA believes that clindamycin does not qualify as an OTC drug. I'm slightly disappointed at this decision.
- cube13 12y ago
  Worth pointing out that Clindamaycin is used to treat MRSA, and resistant strains are appearing now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clindamycin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clindamycin So no, it's not a good idea for more of it to be out there.
- djokkataja 12y ago
  Antibiotics should never be over the counter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_misuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_misuse Prescription antibiotics are already overused; if antibiotics were over-the-counter, antibiotic-resistant bacteria would be a faster-growing problem than it already is: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-antibiotic-resistance.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of...
- jarrett 12y ago
  There are legitimate concerns with unrestricted access to antibiotics. If you misuse them, you're possibly not just hurting yourself. You might be hurting everyone, because you might be breeding resistance bacteria.
mindcrime 12y ago
I have no problem with this either. I don't believe it's a proper role for government to regulate what substances people can buy and ingest. I would happily shut down the FDA altogether. If you're stupid enough to buy and ingest something poisonous, well... so be it. Note that none of this is mean to say that sellers should not be held liable for fraud if they ship something other than what they claim to be shipping. But that's a separate issue.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  You are in the vast minority then. In the bad old days, nothing was certain because there was no standard. Look at China for a modern example of the endemic fraud in food and drugs. The FDA was invented to solve a real problem. Its nothing to do with stupidity - its to do with accountability.
  - mindcrime 12y ago
    > The FDA was invented to solve a real problem. No doubt. But that still leaves open a number of questions: 1. Is it a proper role for government to solve that particular problem? 2. Is the FDA (as we know it) the only possible way to solve that problem? 3. Does solving that problem outweigh the unintended consequences that result from the "solution"? It's easy to say "Oh hey, there's this problem, let's just pass a law to fix it", but the Real World is often times more complicated than that.
    - rosser 12y ago
      1. Is it a proper role for government to solve that particular problem? Who else is going to? There's no profit in it, so you can't expect someone to do it out of Smith-ian self-interest. And you certainly can't expect the pharma companies to police themselves; they hide studies that clearly show adverse, even deadly side effects, and otherwise outright lie, even with the FDA around. Imagine the hijinks that would ensue without it.
    - crazy1van 12y ago
      In general, I support your libertarian way of thinking. But on the other hand, drug resistance does have elements of a tragedy of the commons. Its often in our individual best interests to over medicate, but the group as a whole suffers with resistant germs. Just like it is in every individuals best interest to have the best value vehicle despite of the extra pollution that skimping on some components would cause. Then again, this type of thinking can quickly extend too far. Vast numbers of drugs require prescriptions that have nothing to do with antibiotics. Heck, I can't even get contact lenses without a prescription. That kind of thinking strikes of nannyism.
mindslight 12y ago
If we are to respect the law for legitimate public health reasons like antibiotic resistance, then its administrators shouldn't rot it from the top for misguided moral, economic, and bureaucratic reasons. Until eminently self-prescribable things like Adderall and cocaine are retailed at the corner store, I'll cheer on any "illicit" package that gets through CBP.
justizin 12y ago
is it bad that i was hoping this was a link to amazon?
atdrummond 12y ago
Many of the steroids for sale on amazon are not explicitly illegal, as they are designed specifically to circumvent the current controlled substances list. This is why so many suppliers rushed to liquidate the supplement known as "Superdrol" when the active designer steroid was added to the federal controlled drug registry.

53 points by tehrania 12y ago

Nothing surprising in this. People are using an automated online marketplace to sell illegal goods. Online marketplace takes down products when they are reported. It's a game of whack-a-mole and Amazon is doing the bare minimum. The company has no incentive to do otherwise.

y4mi 12y ago
until someone dies because of a drug sold through their website and the surviving family members feed the media a horror story with which they can create the black sheep, amazon, which profits from the deaths of its customers
- bronson 12y ago
  If people don't care about all the doctors currently overprescribing oxy, xanax, etc, seems like they shouldn't care too much about this.
  - codezero 12y ago
    Most of those people are still under a doctor's care, so while they may not need the medication that much and may pay the price later, there is at least some accounting/supervision going on. When/if someone dies in a case of overprescription, there is clearly someone to be held accountable. A possibly overly sensational case of this is Michael Jackson's doctor who was found guilty of manslaughter. When you self prescribe foreign prescription medication, and die/suffer some massive side effect, there's no real recourse.
aestra 12y ago
Ebay actually has automatic flagging to keep illegal products off their site. I know this because I once tried to sell a pulse oximetry meter there and it got autoflagged and taken down. Apparently you can't sell (some?) medical supplies on ebay even though I bought the pulse ox meter from the store.

nhangen 12y ago

I have zero problem with this. The day doctors sold out and started accepting bribes from pharma reps is the day that I stopped trusting them, and I certainly don't care what they think as it relates to steroids, pain killers, and antibiotics. These are drug dealers complaining that they are being circumvented. Boo hoo.

pavel_lishin 12y ago
I have quite a bit of a problem with people ordering antibiotics, and breeding antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains both inside their bodies, and in our sewers once they feel better and flush the rest of the pills.
- crazy1van 12y ago
  So instead they should go to the their local doctor, pay their $15 co-pay and then take their antibiotics. Come on, we all know that if you have insurance and see your doctor with the sniffles, you can leave with a antibiotic prescription if you want. I'm not defending the illegal online drug markets, but the problem of resistant germs is a much bigger problem and it has nothing to do with Amazon resellers.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    I agree that it's a bigger problem, but I believe this will make it significantly worse. Right now, you have to go to a doctor and get a prescription - if you don't have a bacterial infection, or aren't likely to get one (e.g., post-oral-surgery stuff) they won't prescribe you the antibiotics. If it's possible to buy it on amazon, people will end up 'abusing' them to try and treat non-bacterial infections.
    - Phlarp 12y ago
      Doctors throw antibiotics at viral infections as a placebo cure _all_ the time. Neither that activity nor these Amazon resellers make a dent in antibiotic use when compared to factory farms and traditional cattle operations. Like it or not, antibiotics are a staple in the diets of a large majority of this country's mammalian population

userbinator 12y ago

Note that "illegal" is always relative - there are many drugs that are prescription-only in some countries but available freely in others, illegal in some and not in others, etc.

CanSpice 12y ago
So? What does that have to do with anything? It's illegal in the United States to import these drugs into the United States. Amazon is based in the United States. What does it matter if they're legal or not in any other country? This story is all about importing these drugs into the United States.
- ars 12y ago
  > What does it matter if they're legal or not in any other country? From a legal point of view? None. From a moral? Not so simple. A lot of drugs are prescription only in the US for really no reason whatsoever. Two examples are Nystatin and Mebendazole. I even emailed the FDA about Nystatin and they said that to become OTC it would need a sponsor, which is a stupid reason to leave them prescription only.
  - refurb 12y ago
    For a drug to make the switch from Rx to OTC, you need to prove a lot of things. Can consumers understand how to correctly diagnosis the disease it treats? Can consumers correctly dose themselves? Will consumers knows when to stop treatment and seek professional help. You have to remember that not everyone follows directions or uses medications correctly. I don't blame the FDA for not making a drug OTC unless they can prove it will be used safely.
    - ars 12y ago
      Both those drugs are very easy to use. For Nystatin: Does your baby have a rash that looks like raised red dots? For Mebendazole: Did you drink or come in contact with potentially infected water? There are plenty of OTC drugs with far more complicated symptoms. It's really completely arbitrary - or more accurately, it's driven by companies wanting to expand their market into OTC (as soon as it goes off patent) rather than anything actually medical. Take Nexium for example: It was prescription only (and very expensive) till the patent ended. The day the patent expired it turned OTC.

KerrickStaley 12y ago

I got some topical clindamycin over-the-counter when I was in Thailand, and it worked better than any other acne drug I had tried. I couldn't find it in any pharmacies after returning to the US, however. I emailed the FDA about it, and they responded: Clindamycin is an antibiotic, whereas benzoyl peroxide is not. Necessary characteristics for OTC drugs include an acceptable safety margin, low misuse and abuse potential, and adequate labeling. In addition, consumers must be able to self-diagnose, self-select the medication [self-selection is the decision a consumer makes to use or not to use a drug product based on reading the information on the drug product label and applying knowledge of his or her personal medical history], self-treat and self-manage the condition for which the OTC drug is intended, and additionally, a health care practitioner is not needed for the safe and effective use of the product. An OTC drug is considered to be safe and effective for use by the general public without a prescriber's authorization. At this point in time, FDA believes that clindamycin does not qualify as an OTC drug. I'm slightly disappointed at this decision.

cube13 12y ago
Worth pointing out that Clindamaycin is used to treat MRSA, and resistant strains are appearing now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clindamycin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clindamycin So no, it's not a good idea for more of it to be out there.
djokkataja 12y ago
Antibiotics should never be over the counter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_misuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_misuse Prescription antibiotics are already overused; if antibiotics were over-the-counter, antibiotic-resistant bacteria would be a faster-growing problem than it already is: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-antibiotic-resistance.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of...
jarrett 12y ago
There are legitimate concerns with unrestricted access to antibiotics. If you misuse them, you're possibly not just hurting yourself. You might be hurting everyone, because you might be breeding resistance bacteria.

mindcrime 12y ago

I have no problem with this either. I don't believe it's a proper role for government to regulate what substances people can buy and ingest. I would happily shut down the FDA altogether. If you're stupid enough to buy and ingest something poisonous, well... so be it. Note that none of this is mean to say that sellers should not be held liable for fraud if they ship something other than what they claim to be shipping. But that's a separate issue.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
You are in the vast minority then. In the bad old days, nothing was certain because there was no standard. Look at China for a modern example of the endemic fraud in food and drugs. The FDA was invented to solve a real problem. Its nothing to do with stupidity - its to do with accountability.
- mindcrime 12y ago
  > The FDA was invented to solve a real problem. No doubt. But that still leaves open a number of questions: 1. Is it a proper role for government to solve that particular problem? 2. Is the FDA (as we know it) the only possible way to solve that problem? 3. Does solving that problem outweigh the unintended consequences that result from the "solution"? It's easy to say "Oh hey, there's this problem, let's just pass a law to fix it", but the Real World is often times more complicated than that.
  - rosser 12y ago
    1. Is it a proper role for government to solve that particular problem? Who else is going to? There's no profit in it, so you can't expect someone to do it out of Smith-ian self-interest. And you certainly can't expect the pharma companies to police themselves; they hide studies that clearly show adverse, even deadly side effects, and otherwise outright lie, even with the FDA around. Imagine the hijinks that would ensue without it.
  - crazy1van 12y ago
    In general, I support your libertarian way of thinking. But on the other hand, drug resistance does have elements of a tragedy of the commons. Its often in our individual best interests to over medicate, but the group as a whole suffers with resistant germs. Just like it is in every individuals best interest to have the best value vehicle despite of the extra pollution that skimping on some components would cause. Then again, this type of thinking can quickly extend too far. Vast numbers of drugs require prescriptions that have nothing to do with antibiotics. Heck, I can't even get contact lenses without a prescription. That kind of thinking strikes of nannyism.

mindslight 12y ago

If we are to respect the law for legitimate public health reasons like antibiotic resistance, then its administrators shouldn't rot it from the top for misguided moral, economic, and bureaucratic reasons. Until eminently self-prescribable things like Adderall and cocaine are retailed at the corner store, I'll cheer on any "illicit" package that gets through CBP.

justizin 12y ago

is it bad that i was hoping this was a link to amazon?

atdrummond 12y ago

Many of the steroids for sale on amazon are not explicitly illegal, as they are designed specifically to circumvent the current controlled substances list. This is why so many suppliers rushed to liquidate the supplement known as "Superdrol" when the active designer steroid was added to the federal controlled drug registry.