Human Behaviors in Online Pharmacies

Overview

The online sale of drugs started in the late 1990s and has expanded so much that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has implemented an entire section on its website dedicated to “Buying medicines over the Internet” where consumers can find, among other things, a safety guide, a list of possible dangers and answers to frequently asked questions (Gallagher 2000, FDA 2010). In its atlas of e-health country profiles, the World Health Organization (WHO) includes Internet pharmacies among the items evaluated in the legal and ethical framework (WHO 2011). The WHO is faced with this issue in the context of counterfeit medicines, which “pose a public health risk,” and states that “in over 50% of cases, medicines purchased over the Internet from illegal sites that conceal their physical address have been found to be counterfeit” (WHO 2010). Besides this, the WHO has implemented the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (WHO, IMPACT).

The main challenge in tackling the issue of online pharmacies is the fact that - besides being fairly concealed - it is very complex; scientific works on online pharmacies are fairly difficult to compare owing to the widely differing methods used to select samples and assess them, and often the works are written in answer to multiple research questions.