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).

Comments

More Article Trolling

[Babbster]

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.

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.

Re:More Article Trolling

[GreyWolf3000]

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).

Changing markets, stale business

[crow]

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.)

Re:Changing markets, stale business

[ctr2sprt]

Drug companies spend tens of millions of dollars getting new drugs to market. If their investment isn't reimbursed, they'll just stop researching new drugs. The reason Americans pay so much for meds is precisely that nobody else does. Most other countries have government-provided healthcare, which means the gov't sets the prices it pays for meds. Those prices are usually orders of magnitude below levels that would allow drug companies to get their research investment back. So what they do is charge more in the United States, since they know we'll pay it. As a result, we face increasing health care costs across the board, and every year there are new cries for gov't controls of drug prices. Eventually we'll get it, drug companies will stop making money, and they'll get out of the business. Medical innovation will dry up, viruses will adapt to the existing medications, and we'll see epidemics.

Don't believe me? The flu shot problem, which some people are predicting will turn into an epidemic, is directly caused by price controls of flu shots. None of the flu shot makers were making any money off their product, so they got out of the game. That left only a handful of makers of the vaccine, and they can't keep up with the demand (and they can't keep up with new research: at least one new strain of the flu isn't vaccinated against in this year's shots). So people go without and the vaccine quality gets lower, and next year the problem will only be worse.

Sorry to go off on a bit of a rant here, but this is one of those cases where it really is important (in a life-threatening way) to protect intellectual property rights. It's probably not the best way, but until we've got another system in place to protect the drug companies who do the research, we can't cheat.

Re:Changing markets, stale business

[Mr. Slippery]

Drug companies spend tens of millions of dollars getting new drugs to market.

Drug companies spend twice as much on marketing as on R & D. And they're making enourmous profits at it.

Wanna do away with government interference in drug prices? Fine - start by ceasing the issuance of patents.

No? Then let's admit that the industry needs government interference in drug prices to survive, and make that interference more equitable.

classic slashdot flamebait

[mithras the prophet]

Pharmacists Convince Search Engines To Self-Censor

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.

Re:classic slashdot flamebait

[Jasonv]

- If Google removed the sites from their search index, that would be censorship.

No, it wouldn't. That would be a corporate decision by Google.

If The Government forced google to remove them, THAT would be censorship.

Jason.

Slashdot editors fooled again!

[jmd!]

Let's see. Someone who know's all about the NABP, who writes in with a carefully worded spin to rouse up the typical slashdot reader.

Oh yeah, and his "news article" is hosted on "www.rankforsales.com", a search engine positioning company.

Sounds like the poster is the same guy that's always e-mailing me trying to sell me Viagra on the cheap. No wonder he's disgruntled.

Mexican Pharmacies don't require a recipe?

[aWalrus]

Where are these magical Mexican Pharmacies that will sell you anything without a recipe? I'm mexican, and last time I checked, the pharmacy down the corner still required you to show a prescription to let you buy anything stronger than a cough syrup.

If the article poster meant that Mexican pharmacists are more easily bribed, well, that's another matter, and depends entirely on the pharmacy. Both for the US and Mexico.

Anyway, I think this is a good thing. Americans are overmedicated. Between Prozac, Ritalin and Valium you guys will end up a bunch of happy zombies.

Re:Mexican Pharmacies don't require a recipe?

[fuzzybunny]

I was travelling around the Yucatan a few years ago when I got hit by a major case of Montezuma's revenge. Badly, as in memory leak on four major system interfaces. At the same time.

I walked into a pharmacy around Merida and asked them (rather, my girlfriend asked them, as I'd just spent a night on the can holding a trash bin) what they'd recommend, and the dude forked over some dubious-looking pillbox. Plugged it right up, *plop*, and got rid of the nauseaheadachedizzynessblurryvisionetcetera in one shot.

During the same vacation, I picked up a fairly major sunburn, and was sold some ointment that just made the pain and redness _disappear_. It was uncanny.

My roommate back home at the time was a Roche lab technician; he blanched when he saw what I'd bought. "They're allowed to sell this shit? Legally?" He never did tell me what was in it, but damn, it was sure effective.

So no, I guess Mexican pharmacies are probably not prescription free, but I assume they take a far more pragmatic approach to what requires a prescription, like a lot of the world (judging by my mom's nosedrops that she used to have when living in Europe--.05% cocaine :-)