From The Times
November 20, 2009

Fake medicines seized as websites are shut down

David Rose, Health Correspondent

The public are being warned of the dangers of buying unlicensed medicines on the internet. The alert comes as hundreds of websites are being shut down for selling fake or illicit drugs around the world.

Interpol and the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) co-ordinated raids and public awareness campaigns in 24 countries this week. They confiscated thousands of products linked to more than 750 websites trading in controlled or prescription-only drugs.

In the largest operation of its kind, nearly 167,000 doses of counterfeit or bogus treatments for conditions from asthma to erectile dysfunction have been seized at postal sorting offices, airports, ports or other locations.

The MHRA conducted 13 separate raids on homes and business premises in England, seizing £300,000 of illicit medicines, as well as controlled drugs.

Three arrests were made and more than a dozen people may face court after the raids in London, Chelmsford, Romford, Bristol, Brighton, Stoke-on-Trent, Leicester and Shrewsbury. Officers identifed ten websites selling medicines without a licence and shut six.

Mick Deats, head of enforcement at the MHRA, said that products seized this week in Britain included painkillers, treatments for asthma, local anaesthesics and contraception.

What often looked like a professional online pharmacy would turn out to be an illicit website selling fake or illegal medication. “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,” he said.

“There’s a significantly increased risk of getting bad medicine or just simply being ripped off if you buy from the wrong site. 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.

“The dosages could be either too high or too low, contain no pharmaceutical ingredient or a totally different ingredient to that stated. At best these will be a waste of money. At worst they can kill. If customers could see the filthy conditions in which some of these medicines were being transported, stored and handled, they wouldn’t touch them.”

The Times joined a raid in Leicester early yesterday on a 30-year-old self-employed father of two who had converted his three-bedroom home into a “drug factory”. Five thousand home-made pills and capsules containing ephedrine, a controlled stimulant, were confiscated, along with large amounts of powdered raw ingredient.

Three capsule-making machines, mixtures of caffeine, aspirin and other herbal powders, electronic weighing scales and a laptop were also found. The laptop will be searched for e-mail evidence, orders and past transactions.

The pills were marketed on a website — now closed — as Super T5, or Themorgenic/EPH, described as “a world’s leader in dieting, fatburning and weightloss formula”.

Other substances seized by the MHRA this week included treatments for erectile dysfunction and hair loss and body-building supplements.

Danny Lee-Frost, head of operations at the MHRA, said: “This house, like other premises around the country, was being used as a drug factory. If people go online, this is where they are buying it from — bedrooms, backstreets, garages, lock-ups. You never know what you are going to get, so taking any of these pills could have very unpredictable effects.”

Selling medicines without a licence carries a maxium penalty of two years in prison, and an unlimited fine.

David Pruce, of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB), said: “This is not just about protecting the pharmaceutical industry’s interests. There is real potential for people to be harmed or even die as a result of obtaining medicines from an illegitimate pharmacy website.”