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Another Major Spammer Busted
Iphtashu Fitz writes "25 year old Christopher William Smith, considered one of the worlds biggest spammers by the Spamhaus Project, is now sitting in a jail without bond. Smith allegedly had a doctor issue 72,000 prescriptions in the space of one year in conjunction with orders obtained through spamming. The doctor, Philip Mach, had a license to practice medicine in New Jersey but he provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's. Federal authorities have already seized over $3 million in cash, luxury cars, and houses."
He only has a license to practice medicine in New Jersey, but he provided prescriptions to people in other states.
The doctor, Philip Mach, had a license to practice medicine in New Jersey but he 1: provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States 2: without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's.
Better?
Read TFA! They were NOT busted for spam! They were drug dealers, caught illegally selling narcotics. Spam was how they advertised, but they are getting NO punishment for it.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
The scripts were all for use at the spammers own pharmacy
Your math is wrong. There are 86,400 seconds in a day, so 72,000 prescriptions every 7 seconds would have taken less than a week. Admittedly, his hand would be cramped at that rate... but 72,000 in 11 months works out to about 27 per hour (working 8 hours per day), a rate I think most of us could comfortably sustain if someone was paying six or seven figures. Heck, I'd do it for five figures; except I can't because I'm not a physician, and if I were, I'd expect to get thrown in jail right alongside my spammer friend if I did it.
In other words, I think this scum-sucking doctor is at least as due for "due process" as the spammer. The spammer is annoying, the doctor is putting peoples' lives at risk. Well, OK, they both are. Throw the book at them.
My wife only has to put her DEA number on narcotic 'scripts. I don't think there's any national tracking of non-scheduled medication prescriptions, although I wouldn't assert that as a fact.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
According to TFA: "The indictment claims that from March 2004 to May 2005 the operation generated sales of more than $20 million from medications containing a single addictive painkiller, hydrocodone."
Hydrocodone is probably better known as Lortab or Vicodin. It's addictive. The recipients probably weren't that picky about their source.
Mail order pharmacies are perfectly legal. As long as the pharmacies are meeting the documentation and reporting requirements for the FDA and DEA the vendors don't care. If you order Sched III drugs from the vendors, the DEA will know when and how much. You had better be able to account for the vast majority of them by the scripts you filled. Having six 10,000 count packages of Vicoden unaccounted for can get really ugly for the pham and the dispensers both. 10-15 years ago Sched III handling requirements were a pain, I can't imagine what they are like now, and I wasn't even a pharmacist, just in the industry on the IT side.
The acetaminophen, I believe, acts in synergy with the hydrocodone, so they don't have to put as much dope in the pill to make it work.
hydrocodone is a Schedule II opiate.
Except that for print advertising, the SENDER pays the bulk of the costs (in the form of postage) wheras with electronic spam, the RECEIVER pays the cost (in terms of mail storage space and processing) --- therefore junk-snail-mail tends to be somewhat self-regulating, wheras junk email is not.
It's not the drug makers that supplied the overpriced pills. Unless the drug makers you're referring to are an offshore unregulated pill manufacturer. Pharma companies distribute their products to wholesalers. It is often crooked practices by the wholesalers that get drugs diverted into a situation like this. Often the crooked wholesalers are in Canada, which is a big reason why drug reimportation is such a hot topic.
So wrong! The drug companies actually track their success rates with specific doctors to help their marketing. They need to know what kinds of junkets are most effective!
When a perscription is filled, the information goes into a DEA database and a drug company database. I don't know the specifics on the system, but the DEA has a very good idea who is writing prescriptions for what. When a doctor looses a prescription pad and it gets abused, he will be investigated.
I think that was something called sarcasm.
A few news flashes for you:
1) users hate PGP/GPG. They don't understand it, can't get it to work, and it's not worth anything to them. (google for "why johnny can't encrypt" for two good discussions of the subject.)
2) Spammers aren't even using their own machines to send email at this point, why should they care about an extra second or two to sign or encrypt a message? It's someone else's CPU cycles, not theirs.
3) Mailing lists, support addresses, public accounts, sales folks, etc, would all fail in your system, since they all need to be able to take in (and often send) messages to people they've never talked to before and won't have a key for.
Encryption/signing of email is not the answer. There's a reason why email encryption has languished for 10 years...it sucks.
So Smith went to the Dominican Republic and tried to restart spamming from there. On June 28th, a judge issued an arrest warrant for him. When he returned to the US, he was arrested, but released on bail, with home monitoring.
The prosecution then asked for a six-month criminal contempt sentence for trying to violate the injunction and fleeing prosecution. Smith had a court date for that in July, and lost. So now he's in jail for six months.
This is somebody who just didn't get it when the court ordered him to stop.
This is just the first phase. The felony case is just getting underway.
Good afternoon, Wowbagger, long time no see.
JCAHO is the Joint Committee on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. They're the guys who determine if your hospital gets "certified" to actually take care of patients. You can check out their website Here.
They do some valuable things... but they also can ding your hospital on some truly maddening minutiae. Also, as I noted in my initial post, not all of their "input" is necessarily helpful.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Ibuprofen is marketed as an analgesic (largely because it reduces the swelling that causes some pain), but it's not addictive. Analgesics that are CNS depressants are often (always?) addictive, but that's not the only pain relieving mechanism.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The studies on combination opiods/analgesics have been around for over 20 years, and suggest that combination agents (combining more than one mechanism of action) are more effective than single agents alone, even when those single agents are used in higher doses.
Pubmed, courtesy of the NIH, is your friend.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It was my understanding that JCAHO's regulation allowed such lists as long as they were not available to the general hospital staff and was restricted to the treating physicians in the ER. One hospital I worked at fairly recently still kept such a list on a corkboard in the physician break room. We didn't even have to compile the list ourselves since the state Dept of Health sent out a letter to all physicians who had treated patients who filled a suspicious number of controlled substances prescriptions. I wish the state where I live now did that.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."