Slashdot Mirror
Top Google Executives Approved Illegal Drug Ads
Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that the U.S. government used convicted con artist David Whitaker, owner of an online business selling steroids and human growth hormone to U.S. consumers, to help federal agents in a sting operation against Google when he began advertising with Google with advertisements that included the statement 'no prescription needed,' clearly violating U.S. laws. Google's settlement with the U.S. government for $500 million blamed AdWords sales by Canadian pharmacies, who allegedly were selling drugs to U.S. consumers. 'We banned the advertising of prescription drugs in the U.S. by Canadian pharmacies some time ago,' Google said then. 'However, it's obvious with hindsight that we shouldn't have allowed these ads on Google in the first place.' Peter Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting, claims that chief executive Larry Page had personal knowledge of the operation, as did Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who now is the chief operating officer for Facebook. In 2009 Google started requiring online pharmacy advertisers to be certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy's Verified Internet Pharmacy Practices Sites program and hired an outside company to detect pharmacy advertisers exploiting flaws in the Google's screening systems."
That's when the American business school ethic takes over. No right or wrong, legal or illegal, no such thing as pride in workmanship or quality; just whatever it takes to make the books look good for the next quarter. And, if it's illegal hope you're not the sorry sucker holding the bag before you get a chance to cash out.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Ya because Americans being able to get decently priced drugs, is such a crime. My father buys drugs from a company like the ones they mention in the ads. He can't afford drugs here in the USA even though the ones he gets from Canada are exactly the same, yet cost one tenth the price.
For Google, it's not that much, but $500 million for most of us would be.... wait for it... a bitter pill to swallow.
the Wall Street Journal has fallen far under murdochs ownership.
Everything in the story comes from either a Con Artists claiming it's true, or known events that do not contridict the original story.
I was ready to rail against this, but after reading the article, it's all shit.
And then end?
" allegedly from Jason Corriente's brother, saying the online entrepreneur died in a car crash."
So, they got all the evidences and did nothing?
Sorry, not buying it. Lets have the feds come forward to confirm this story.
Of course, people on slashdot won't bother to consider the source, they'll just pounce on the headline to 'prove' their ideological belief about Google or business.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sounds like a good cash grab for the government.
500 million is petty chump change for the US federal government. You could define the Planck time in terms of how long 500 million dollars would keep the US government in operation.
The whole thing is stupid anyway. Good drug dealers don't deliver ads to your browser. They use networks of trust.
Like all such restrictions on what consenting adults do, these laws are a sort of IQ test -- the dumb ones get caught. The smart ones? Unless you participate you never even know they are there. This overuse of police power and regulatory authority breeds smarter dealers who are harder to catch just like what overuse of antibiotics does to staph.
Seriously some of you really think all this regulation of some things and straight up prohibition of other things is changing anything? Every day you get in your car and drive to work I guarantee you, other drivers around you are high on something, carrying something, transporting something, about to sell something. This foolishness just makes them hide it, that's all.
I should preface this by saying that I am no Google fan. I think they have made many poor decisions over the past few years, and the GPYW initiative has caused me to switch over to DuckDuckGo full time.
Having said that...
Why is it illegal for Canadian drug companies to advertise their goods in the United States? The US has insanely high drug prices, and Canadian imports of those same products are (or could be) beneficial to the lives, health, and finances of who knows how many people. This is an unjust law, and am having an incredibly difficult time finding a justification for it.
This seems like yet another instance of the pharmaceutical lobby protecting their vast profits from competition.
Bavarian illuminati, freemasons, elders of zion, the psyops corps of the PLA and the shade of Osama bin Laden.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Have to agree. Sting? Google? They could have just told them. If the government wants to steal there money and ours, I would prefer plain old taxes. No speed traps, crazy fines in some cities that will get everyone about once a year, etc. Sometimes things get past the Mexican border too. Why should Google do their job anyhow?
I know Google has a lot of money, but a $500,000 fine is plain theft. Has the government stopped drugs coming in thru Mexico? Maybe they should be fined for that. It's all silly.
It's funny you say that, have you ever actually ben in an American Business school? I have, and we were required to take several ethics courses as well as weighing the ethical impacts of any decisions we made in case studies.
Just curious - did the ethics courses try to teach you how to differentiate between one decision that makes a lot of money from one that makes slightly more money or did they have any lessons on how to decide between A, which breaks some laws and involves some lies but makes the company a nice profit, and B, which obeys the law but costs the company huge losses and your job.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Shattering of an illusion that scroogle.org has tried to tell us about for so long: Google is evil, like all the rest of them.
http://www.scroogle.org/gifs/gscrew.gif
Some alternatives to searching, which I think is the most dangerous tool to lose your privacy on: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://www.ixquick.com/ and of course http://scroogle.org/ that has many SSL-solutions, depending on your OS.
I wonder whether government computers will continue to get quality search results from Google, seeing as Google has now lost some money to operate their very demanding data centers... ;)
All the government operated computers I use already redirect www.google.com to www.baidu.com and www.yandex.com.
Ever since we install that Symantec suite, things just haven't been the same ...
And why would you want to buy them without a prescription? That seems pretty silly, really.
Agreed, no fees for drivers licenses and plates and marriage licenses. No tolls or other charges. All this crap is just a way to avoid using the tax system to pay for government services.
Its made to SOUND fair, the people using the service pay the fee, but if you are pulling in a few billion a year its far more preferable to pay a $50 fee for your license plate* than to pay your fair share of the cost to provide everyone with plates under the progressive tax system. Who pays the difference between your million dollar fair share of that cost and the $50 you paid instead? The single mother of four whose kids went hungry last night, she works in a factory owned by the billionaire.
Because nobody's time is worth billions. Those billions represent the labor of millions of fellow citizens and those citizens needed millions of license plates in order to produce those billions. The guy who ends up with the billions should pay for the license plates it represents, not the fellow citizens who did the work.
*Analogy is slightly flawed since license plates exist primarily for the purpose of systematically charging fees and really should be gotten rid of.
This has been covered every this story comes up on Slashdot. Unregulated, unlicensed pharmacies are dangerous--not only do people get drugs without a doctor's prescription, but there's no guarantee that the drugs are even the right drugs or that they've been handled properly. Counterfeit drugs, outdated drugs, contaminated drugs, mislabeled drugs--anything goes. And there are other problems, like the fact they can sell to minors or that there is nothing legally enforcing confidentiality like with a legitimate pharmacy. You complain about high drug prices, but there's nothing stopping some yahoo from selling a complete rip-off (and a potentially life-threatening one, as in the link). The foundation of a civilized society is some form of centralized regulation, or you just have total chaos as the people who callously fuck over other people win out.
Yet another example highlighting the fact that "illegal" does not necessarily equate to "wrong".
How about we instead turn our rightful indignation against Big Pharma and ask why the fuck is it not legal to buy the same drugs from Canada for less? When I moved to the US, I was shocked by how badly US residents are being gouged when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Nowhere else in the world do drugs cost as much as they do in the US. In some places the same exact drugs by the same exact companies are sold at 1/5th to 1/10th the price.
Very confused here. I thought corporations were now people so where are their 1st amendment protections?
That thinking only applies when you are a corporate entity looking to publish negative, often completely untrue ads about politicians without revealing who you are or who gave you money... If you are looking to do something like making money off of the promotion of the availability of prescription-like substances on the international market, you bet your ass that it's not about rights any more...
Back in college I worked for a very large computer retailer. One of the things the managers there did, was take hardware that they couldn't sell, and just store it in the back room. They wouldn't discount it, because their bonuses were dependent on the margin they maintained for the quarter, and if you dump a bunch of laptops at a discount, it adds up very quickly. Anyway, this went on for years, with each manager just piling up the problem for the next guy to deal with, before rotating into some new position at a new store. Eventually, someone in corporate caught wind of this, and took some steps to dump the old hardware. They put it on sale one weekend for a few hours before yanking it, because even a few hours of discount caused a ping on the corporate servers when they detected a sharp drop in margin at the store. That caused whatever corporate flunky to get cold feet, and start sweating his bonus for the quarter. So, back to the warehouse it all went.
I don't know what was more appalling, the stupidity or the greed. AMERICA, LIVE THE DREAM!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
they were linking to it!
and if you're been breathing at all during the last few years, you know that if you LINK to things, its the same as DOING those things.
you know what I'm talking about.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sounds like a good cash grab for the government.
500 million is petty chump change for the US federal government. You could define the Planck time in terms of how long 500 million dollars would keep the US government in operation.
500 million is a huge windfall for the small agency that conducted the sting. Unfortunately it gives them the resources to setup and entrap other large companies. This happens all the time. Another example is the Michigan State agency that figured out how to go after people buying cigarettes over the internet and not paying state taxes - they got enough cash from the first round of lawsuits to triple the number of people working in that dept.
If you read the article, it details just how much effort the govt put into convincing and tricking Google execs into accepting the ads. It's important to note that Google initially refused the ads entirely until they changed the website so that you had to contact the company directly (which makes the website an advertisement for services and not a store, btw). Then the feds had to keep nagging and begging to get the ads released in the US. This is a classic case of entrapment.
I think Google just paid the $500 million because it's chump change to them and they want this to quietly go away as a long trial could have cost more in lawyers fees and damage to their reputation..
Is the next target going to be eBay because they knowingly allow counterfeit items to be sold? They've already tried zinging them for this before.
Come on all you Ron Paul supporters, let's hear it. We *should* be able to buy Canadian drugs at 1/10 the price of what we're being ripped off in the USA for the same crap.
And before you bring up safety/prescriptions/handling/lifethreating issues as a factor, consider this: We buy food from China, which has far less controls regarding safety than Canada does.
That Apple Juice you're buying in Walmart? Madde from Chinese grown Apples. Who knows what those apples were exposed to, what toxins are in the ground the were grown in, how they were handled/processed and what else the factory that makes this juice also makes?
The Apple Juice you buy in Walmart could be as deadly, or even more deadly than any Canadian Pharmacy or drug "internet purchase".
The *ONLY* reason that drugs are as heavily regulated as they are in this country is to protect Corporate interests (aka BigPharma). There is NO OTHER reason. Any other excuse you've been given by the talking heads on TV is window dressing.
And if we had a real free market economy, sure, some people would die, but that's the way free market economies work. Frankly, that's the way this economy works as well, regulated or not.
Think about how many people die because they are denied health care due to insurance rates, or they can't afford the medication they've been prescribed.
No matter which way you go, people are going to die, that's just a reality. But to say that you're saving lives by not allowing Canadian Pharmacies to sell in the USA is a complete lie.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Is it true the marks from those courses get deducted from your overall score?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Currently that would be the IRS and congress.
Correction: one of their users linked to it.
In all your yapping about who's right, wrong or has to support big pharma think of this:
Number of Google employees that the government considered sending to prison: 0
Number of people selling less than 1 ounce of marijuana sentenced to federal prison: 5,452
Number of drug arrests per minute in the USA: 25
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Actually if you look at our history the times of the highest growth was when the top tax rate was 70% or above which makes perfect sense if you think about it. you see when you have a tax rate that high for the uber rich if they sit on the money then they don't sit on the money, they invest it instead since there was all these provisions that lowered their tax rates if they used the money to increase productivity. Now they simply set it overseas thanks to being able to electronically send it anywhere in a nanosecond or just dodge the taxes all together like the double dutch and Irish tax scams. For a good read on the subject i'd suggest this article where the author lays it out clearly and concisely and puts that 'job creators need lower taxes' myth to bed. to see what the lowest taxes on the top 1% in the history of our country has done for us follow it up with this article which again lays out the facts and shows if lower taxes on the wealthy were to actually create jobs they sure as fuck aren't being created here.
in the end its not about fair or letting some fifth generation superrich continue the dynasty, its about a government doing what its supposed to do which is promote the welfare of the entire country and not just a specific class. As Buffet so accurately put it "We have had class warfare for years and we're winning" which all you have to do is look out a window at the boarded up homes and closed factories across this once great nation to know this is true.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Why should we worry about google leaving if we fine it for breaking laws; citizens don't get the same luxury. We should in no way treat corporations better than people just because we're afraid of them leaving.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Yep. So mad, in fact, he invented a time machine and went back to 2009 and asked the DOJ to fuck them over. Google would never suspect that their August 2011 fine was related to their future opposition of SOPA, which wasn't even introduced until two months later.
Revenge is a dish best served preemptively, it seems.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
500 million is a huge windfall for the small agency that conducted the sting. Unfortunately it gives them the resources to setup and entrap other large companies.
I think this should be "Fortunately". When I was in chemotherapy, my capecitabene tablets cost $1600 for a 2 week supply, or I could buy them from an on-line pharmacy for $650. It was tempting to save a bunch of money but I didn't because that medication was too important for me to trust an unknown supplier. One of other patients at my clinic told me that he ordered some from an online pharmacy in the US (or so he thought) and they arrived in an anonymous envelope from Guyana and with a size, shape and color different from the tablets supplied by local pharmacies. Fake? No way to tell for sure. But how many unsuspecting people are dying from pharmacies supplying fake medications? I don't know, nobody knows.
Cutting off the ways to advertise these places is a good idea. You think it's "unfortunate" that Google was caught and you decry the methods used to go after Google. I think that this is a great way for the government to help save people's lives by enforcing reasonable and necessary laws.
It doesn't go "directly in their pockets," but what happens is that the extra money is brought to the attention of the people who allocate budgets. Those people then allocate more to whoever brought in the money in the hope that there is more where that came from and extra staff will better be able suck that cash out of the economy and into the government budget without anything so politically unacceptable as "tax increases."
Actually if you look at our history the times of the highest growth was when the top tax rate was 70% or above which makes perfect sense if you think about it.
Actually if you look at our history, the times of the highest growth was in the *1800s* when there was ZERO income tax, for ANYONE.
The massive growth in the 1950s was due to our country being practically the only industrial power on the earth left standing after World War II. The growth was *in spite of* incredibly high taxation, not because of.
If they were made in India, they might differ in size, shape, or color because India doesn't recognize pharmaceutical patents for uses or chemicals -- it only recognizes patents for manufacturing processes. So, when somebody like Pfizer patents a drug in India, they get a patent on the specific process they use to manufacture the drug. If somebody comes up with a different way to make the same drug, they can patent it and sell the drug in India with complete legality. Cipla is notorious (among American/European pharma companies) for doing this. Because they have to come up with a different manufacturing process to legally avoid infringement, the alternate generics usually WILL be different in form (capsule vs tablet, color, taste, etc).
In America, you can take an old drug like finasteride or doxepin (marketed for treating an enlarged prostate or depression), change the dosage slightly, then get a new 18-year patent for it as a treatment for hair loss or insomnia. In India, you'd be laughed at and get told to stick your silly American "use" patent where the sun doesn't shine.
Indian drugs often taste a hell of a lot better than their American versions, because many American drugs are intentionally formulated to taste bad so kids won't "think they're candy". American atenolol is one specific example -- it tastes AWFUL. The Indian Atenolol I've been buying for the past couple of years, in contrast, is gelcoated.
Would I buy imported chemotherapy drugs? No. There's too much at stake, over a relatively short period of time.
I have no qualms about buying long-term "maintenance" drugs like atenolol, though, that are so cheap to make, it would almost cost more for them to try and convincingly fake it. The key is to sample new batches slowly, and be alert for any noticeable differences. The biggest real risk is that an unethical foreign supplier might repackage one drug as another of equivalent dosage, like repackaging propranolol as atenolol, or omeprazole as esomeprazole. The nice thing about drugs from India is that they come in foil packets instead of bottles, so substituting one for another requires larger-scale fraud than merely shipping 60 tablets from bottle #2 instead of bottle #1. The foil also keeps them fresh longer, so you can buy them a year's worth at a time and be through with it, instead of screwing around with refills every month and dealing with "we know you're going on vacation out of the country for two weeks, but your health insurance won't approve payment for the refill until 3 days from now" bullshit.
I would be cautious of extended-release formulations, because it's definitely possible that the difference could matter. On the other hand, it could end up being better. Once again, if it's a drug you've been taking for years, and will be taking for years, after a while... you're going to have a pretty good idea whether your new supply is or is not the same. If anything, you're more likely to experience variations with drugs bought from somewhere like Wal Mart, where they might change suppliers every couple of months, and there's abundant evidence online that different generics ABSOLUTELY differ in their pharmacokinetics (google "bupropion budeprion teva" for one of the more infamous examples of this). Unlike American pharmacies, most online pharmacies will at least let you pick the brand as well as the drug itself.
Insofar as Indian quality goes, keep in mind that probably 90% of the generic drugs at Wal Mart come from the same plants in India as the drugs sold online. The irony is that India actually has tighter requirements on generic bioequivalence than the FDA does (ie, the FDA allows up to 20% variance; I think it's 5% or less in India).
Ultimately, it comes down to how much time and research you're willing to invest, and your tolerance for risk. If you're a MBTI xxxJ, online pharmacies probably aren't for you. The anxiety from the abstract risk and fear of disobeying authority will kill you. If you're a MBTI xNTP who can explain a drug's pharmacokinetics and metabolization path better than your own doctor can, online pharmacies are a gift from ${deity}.