Slashdot Mirror
Pharmacists Convince Search Engines To Self-Censor
RogueShopper writes "The National Association of Boards of Pharmacists (NABP) has teamed up with Drugstore.com in a seemingly successful campaign to 'rid search engines of ads from rogue pharmacies.' Overture removed ranked ads at the request of MSN and Yahoo!, and AOL and Google complied, also. In an apparently selfless act Yahoo! also wiped out its entire directory tree for pharmacies. Meanwhile, anyone can cross the border, walk into a Mexican pharmacy and buy whatever they want. Big busines controlling content ... hmmm ... looks like it's getting closer to broadcast television. Thank god for DMOZ.org!" (Here's Google's cache of Yahoo!'s Pharmacies list).
If you mean that illegal product advertising is being weeded out, then, yes, it's getting closer to broadcast television. The online pharmacies we're talking about often require nothing more than a credit card to order whatever drug a person wishes. Like it or not, that's not the way we've decided to do things in the USA because we've decided that there are too many dangerous drugs to let the public have them willy-nilly without a doctor's supervision.
As far as the snide comment about being able to cross the border to Mexico and buy whatever one eishes, that's exactly right. Of course, an American who does so can then be arrested for smuggling when re-crossing the border.
This is less about big business (which, frankly, profits when their drugs are bought legally with a prescription, or illegally via an online pharmacy with no prescription) and more about complying with existing laws.
On the surface, this is about protecting consumers from pharmacies that will fill perscriptions without a doctor's approval.
What it's really about is protecting profit margins.
Sure, there are businesses out there selling questionable or illegal products, but the real concern is the cross-boarder drug purchases. Americans are increasingly re-importing perscription drugs from foreign countries (mostly Canada) where laws and market conditions keep the prices lower than in the United States. The popularity of re-imported drugs has started to impact the profits of the drug companies, and they're fighting back. They're doing everything the can to stop the flow of drugs from Canada. I wouldn't be surprised if they're pushing for the Medicare drug coverage, because once seniors aren't paying for their own drugs, they won't bother ordering them from Canada. (Obviously, the big market for Canadian drugs is uninsured seniors.)
Umm, declining to accept purchased advertisements for illegal products is not exactly censorship.
- If Google removed the sites from their search index, that would be censorship.- If Google declined to accept ads for legal products that it didn't like, that might be questionable, but it wouldn't be censorship. cf. newspapers declining to accept advertisements for pornography.
- But Google declining to accept ads for illegal products? Wake me up when there's news.
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty