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).
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.
There's still a lot of legal-for-research drugs (triptomines) that are fairly easy to aquire (apply for a research permit, get accepted, then you're "in"). The reason no one cares is because we're too busy dealing with pot.
Dextromethorphan has recently gotten some news, but there are many others that aren't seeing much airtime. For those who don't know, DXM is an anticongestant agent in cough syrup that, when taken by itself, has extremely potent dissociative and hallucigenic results.
It is a lot scarier than pot or prescription painkillers, since a lot of kids are drinking cough syrup in order to get the effects (and thereby introducing insane levels of other chemicals in the syrup into their bodies).
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.