Websites selling illegal drugs increasingly face closure
pharmafile | February 12, 2015 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | MHRA, counterfeit, drugs, illegal, on tap, websites
The number of websites shut down by the MHRA for selling illegal pharmaceutical products has increased dramatically in recent years, according to a new report.
The ‘On Tap’ report by the Royal United Services Institute shows that number of sites closed rose from around 200 in 2010, to over 1,800 in 2014.
It adds that the unregulated nature of the internet compared to pharmacies have made it a perfect place for illegal medicines trading – the majority of illicit pharmaceuticals are obtained online rather than in pharmacies, and more than half of all spam emails have medicines as their subjects with links that take people to illegal websites.
Alastair Jeffrey, the MHRA enforcement group manager says: “We welcome this report and as the UK regulator of medicines and medical devices, we are focussed on tackling the illegal medicines trade. The report identifies much of the good work currently being undertaken by us and other government agencies.
“Our priority is to protect public health and while the involvement of organised crime in the illegal trade of medicines is not new, our work continues to evolve to counter the growing influence of the internet and other factors.
“We would reiterate our advice that people should be alert to the risks of buying medicines online from illegitimate sources – medicines supplied cannot be guaranteed to meet set standards of quality and safety – in short, you don’t know what you’re getting, where it came from or if it’s safe for you to take.”
However, the report notes that it is difficult to tell how big the illicit pharma trade actually is, due to the challenges of products and definitions as well as the low-priority given to the trade compared to illegal tobacco and alcohol.
This is often because prioritisation tends to be based on the extent of physical harm, which is difficult to prove when fatalities are assumed to be caused by the patient’s illness rather than the drug.
Nevertheless, the exact scale of these activities is thought to be vast – in May 2014 a week of co-ordinated international operations seized 8.4 million doses of illegal drugs, half of which were seized in the UK.
This is largely blamed on the ‘low-risk and high reward’ nature of the crime: the maximum penalty for offences under the Medicines Act 1968 is two years of imprisonment – and the fact that pharma products are relatively easy to counterfeit due to the standardisation of tablet sizes, vials and packets brought about by high levels of regulation.
Just earlier this month the MHRA shut down a facility in Cambridgeshire that was producing an unlicensed version of the cancer treatment GcMAF, made with blood plasma material labelled as “not to be administered to humans or used in any drug products”.
George Underwood
Related Content
Digital mental health technologies – a valuable tool in supporting people with depression and anxiety
The potential benefits of digital mental health technology for managing depression, anxiety and stress, together …
IMed Consultancy releases white paper on Digital Mental Health Technologies
IMed Consultancy, a consultancy and service provider for the medical and health technology sector, has …
Dual immunotherapy for bowel cancer now available under NHS
Dual immunotherapy, a combination of Opdivo (nivolumab) and Yervoy (ipilimumab), has been granted extension in …
