By Francois Murphy
Vienna - Illegal drug sales on the Internet are booming as unlicensed online pharmacies selling drugs like morphine evade a patchy global effort to stop them, the United Nations narcotics watchdog said on Wednesday.
In its 2004 annual report, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) said Internet pharmacies sell several billion doses of medicine illicitly each year and deliver them by post, making them an alternative drug-trafficking route.
"They are really taking the place of traditional drug traffickers," INCB President Hamid Ghodse said at a news conference ahead of the report's release.
Another source of concern was Iraq "It is very much increasing rapidly," Ghodse said, when asked how quickly the problem was growing.
Continues Below ↓
The vast majority of drugs sales by online pharmacies involved internationally controlled narcotics and so-called psychotropic substances, which act on the mind, the INCB said. Of those, around 90 percent were sold without the required prescription.
"Billions of (doses of) controlled substances - some of them highly potent drugs such as oxycodone, which is equivalent to morphine, and fentanyl, which is many times stronger than morphine - are sold by unlicensed Internet pharmacies," he added.
These pharmacies blurred the distinction between licit and illicit drugs by offering prescription medication to all customers alongside over-the-counter products like food supplements, the INCB said.
They also posed a risk to children, the INCB said.
"The illicit trade over the Internet has been identified as one of the major sources for prescription medications abused by children and adolescents in certain countries such as the United States," the INCB said in its report.
Legal suppliers were fuelling the illicit trade by providing unlicensed Internet pharmacies with many of the drugs they sell, and national authorities should do more to stop them, it added.
Continues...
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
