Dangers of buying illegal medications online highlighted

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has announced that an international week of action targeting the online sale of counterfeit and illicit medicines has highlighted the dangers of buying such medicines online.

Due to an ever-increasing number of websites supplying dangerous and illegal medicines, INTERPOL and the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT) have this week co-ordinated 24 countries to launch Operation Pangea II.

National medicines regulators, police and customs have extensively collaborated in this global campaign. The MHRA is the government agency responsible for ensuring that medicines and medical devices work, and are acceptably safe.

The operation focused on the three principle components of an illegal website, the Internet Service Provider (ISP), payment systems and the delivery service.

Global awareness campaigns are planned to make sure patients realise that purchasing medicines from unregulated websites significantly increases the risks of obtaining counterfeit, sub-standard and dangerous products.

In the United Kingdom, enforcement officers from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) raided suspected premises in London, Chelmsford, Romford, Bristol, Brighton, Stoke-on-Trent, Leicester and Shrewsbury. Three arrests were made, six websites have been closed down and £300,000 worth of illicit medicines were seized, as well as quantities of controlled drugs.

The types of medicines the MHRA found included those for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, contraception, weight loss, pain relief, asthma, local anaesthesia and steroids.

MHRA Head of Enforcement, Mick Deats, said that what often looked like a professional online pharmacy would turn out to be an illicit website selling fake or illegal medication.

"This week we have recovered a range of different medicines that were being supplied with no prescription and stored in unacceptable conditions by persons unqualified to dispense medicines. ...

These websites often look like the real deal, but if they don’t carry the green cross logo of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) and have a ‘bricks and mortar’ address, then they are often dealing illegally.

The dangers of purchasing medicines from unregulated websites are that you just don’t know what you are taking. The dosages could be either too high or too low, contain no pharmaceutical ingredient or a totally different ingredient to that stated. Illegal suppliers have no quality control or standards to abide by and people who purchase medicine from these sources will never know where the tablets they are putting in their mouths have actually originated or what they contain.

Mr Deats went on to add that:

“If customers could see the filthy conditions in which some of these medicines were being transported, stored and handled, they wouldn’t touch them.”

If you feel that your medicine may be counterfeit, contact the MHRA’s dedicated 24 hour anti-counterfeiting hotline on 020 7084 2701 or by email to counterfeit@mhra.gsi.gov.uk.