In the lingering fallout from a damning report on steroid use by Major League Baseball players, the sport's top executive is calling on Congress to help in leading a crackdown on Internet pharmacies.
"Sen. Mitchell's report identified the difficulties inherent in any attempt, whether by baseball, by other professional sports, or by the Olympics, to stop by itself the use of illegal performance-enhancing substances," MLB Commissioner Bud Selig told members of a U.S. House of Representatives panel at a hearing on the topic on Tuesday afternoon, according to prepared remarks (PDF). "We welcome your participation in attacking the problem at its source."
Selig, of course, was referring to 304 pages' worth of findings by George Mitchell, a former U.S. senator whom MLB hired in 2006 to investigate past steroid use by its players. The resulting document implicated star players, including Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield, brothers Jason and Jeremy Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Kevin Brown, and David Justice, and it described alleged illegal Internet-based purchases of performance-enhancing substances by 16 other players.
Selig told the committee that baseball executives "wholly support" a sweeping crime bill introduced last October by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) that attempts to rein in online pharmacies that dispense prescription drugs without valid permission from a doctor.
Biden's broader bill incorporates a standalone online pharmacy proposal, co-sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), that was already approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.
Among other things, that proposal would require that Internet sites dispense "controlled substances," such as many widely used pain-killing narcotics, only after processing a valid prescription from a doctor who has given the patient at least one in-person evaluation. Pharmacies would also be required to display certain identifying information on their Web sites and state their compliance with the law. Failure to comply would carry steep fines and up to 20 years in prison.
It's hardly a new idea. Congress has been trying to pass legislation regulating online pharmacies since before the dot-com bust.
Feinstein first drafted such a bill shortly after a California high-school honor student and athlete named Ryan Haight died in 2001 from an overdose of the painkiller hydrocodone. According to Feinstein's office, Haight had purchased the drug from an online pharmacy after filling out a questionnaire, claiming he was a 25-year-old with back pain, and securing a prescription from a doctor who had never examined him in person.
It's not entirely clear whether the new legislation is needed. A federal law called the Controlled Substances Act already makes it illegal to dispense certain classes of drugs without a valid prescription from a physician.
Backers of the new Internet pharmacy bill say their measure would "clarify" that the law also applies online, but prosecutors
There's also the international enforcement conundrum: About half of online pharmacy sites reside overseas, according to research described before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year by Joseph Califano, the chairman and president of Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. About a fourth of the sites are based in the United States, and the remaining ones have unknown origins, he added.
Still, Biden, Sessions, and Feinstein each pointed to Selig's testimony as proof that their legislation should be passed promptly.
"Rogue online pharmacies have become the street corner drug dealers of the Information Age," Sen. Feinstein said in a statement Tuesday evening. "Whether it's a superstar or a teenager, we must ensure that they cannot obtain controlled substances without a valid prescription."
(Credit:
MarkMonitor)
MarkMonitor, a San Francisco-based enterprise brand protection company, on Monday released its latest survey. During June, MarkMonitor tracked more than 100,000 drug-related spam landing sites and found a majority of these practice poor Internet security and may not be selling legitimate brand-name drugs, which could endanger users tempted by the low prices offered.
While that's not earth-shattering news, the report gives concrete statistics surrounding the practice known as "brandjacking," which can encompass a variety of online threats to brand names. In the report, MarkMonitor said sample drugs purchased from these sites tested as either stolen, expired, diluted or alternative forms of known brand-name drugs.
MarkMonitor reports that on a daily basis, more than 6,000 unique sites are responsible for these drug-related spam messages, with more than half of this traffic originating in China and Russia. Of the 3,160 online pharmacies landing sites studied, only four are accredited as Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS). One third of the online pharmacies used in the drug-related spam messages generate enough traffic to merit an Alexa ranking.
According to MarkMonitor, a majority of the online pharmacies surveyed, 58 percent, were hosted in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 18 percent. More than 50 percent of these sites do not secure customer data, putting consumers? identity information at risk.
To avoid prosecution from registered brand owners, some of these online pharmacies are using a practice called "kiting." Kiting is when a company registers and uses a domain for the ICANN-allowed grace period of five days or less without actually purchasing it. In researching the domain name histories of several pharmacies, MarkMonitor found that a few companies are sharing and kiting the same domain names over and over, more or less cybersquatting for free.
AOL once deemed an infamous Minnesota spammer named Christopher William Smith "the poster child for the Can-Spam Act."
A federal judge in his home state on Wednesday had a new name for the convicted junk mailer: "drug kingpin." He sentenced Smith to 30 years in prison for multiple charges stemming from his highly lucrative online drugstore, whose illegal sales brought in about $24 million, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis reports.
U.S. authorities originally arrested Smith in 2005 on the belief that he had moved his business, called XPress Pharmacy, to the Dominican Republic after his stateside operations were ordered to cease.
Smith, who went by the moniker "Rizler," first gained notoriety by reportedly blasting to AOL subscribers billions of junk e-mails promoting the usual array of spamalicious goods: "generic Viagra," porn, cable TV descramblers and penis-enhancement pills, according to reports. Security experts once ranked him among their most prolific offenders.
After filing a civil suit against Smith under the 2004 Can-Spam Act, AOL managed to win a $5.3 million damages award, which was one of the largest judgments it had ever received.
As part of the online pharmacy criminal case, the feds had already seized 17 of Smith's automobiles and sold them at auction last year for more than $1.6 million, according to the Star Tribune. Smith's attorney told the newspaper that he had never heard of an online pharmacy conviction that topped 20 years.
A federal law called the Controlled Substances Act makes it illegal to dispense certain classes of drugs without a valid prescription from a physician, but politicians have been pushing in recent years for additional regulations targeting Internet-based services.
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