Advertisements from unlicensed Web pharmacies selling millions of prescription drugs without medical authorization will be dropped by Google, the Internet’s top search engine said over the final weekend in November.
This move follows similar decisions earlier in the fall by Yahoo and MSN, according to the Washington Post, which added the move comes as federal regulators and lawmakers start moving from the rogue sites to the legitimate sites that help the sales.
Google moved after a suburban Chicago father told the search engine his son used Google to find and order Vicodin from a Florida Website and was hospitalized subsequently for drug treatment, according to the newspaper. This father, the paper added, believes Google dropping such rogue ads will save lives.
"(L)egitimate businesses are an important but faceless part of the supply chain for these dangerous drugs," said Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, to the Post. "If the government is serious, it has to look at these businesses." His group has pushed Google and others to stop helping the rogue sites and reject their advertising.
Google spokesman David Krane told the Post they would use a third-party company to weed out the rogue sites and would ban the names of certain controlled substances as keywords in Google’s search-related advertising.
”Illegal Internet pharmacies have become a virtually unregulated pipeline for highly addictive painkillers, tranquilizers and anti-depressants that have resulted in overdoses and deaths,” the newspaper said. “Search engines are littered with advertisements for the rogue Web sites. Customers type in a drug name, such as Vicodin, and they are immediately linked to an array of Web sites.”
Health care, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, took care of five percent of total Internet ad sales in October, but those ratings did not determine just what portion of the volume came from the rogue sites, which paid search engines like Google and Yahoo to link ads to keywords typed in by surfers.
Federal lawmakers like Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Michigan) have been frustrated with the slowness of regulators in stopping the rogue drug Websites, citing the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Customs, and the Department of Homeland Security, the Post said.
"It is growing exponentially because the regulatory agencies charged with enforcement have not applied adequate resources, nor have they approached the issue systematically," Dingell told the paper. "DEA, FDA and Customs must find those resources and change their policies, as well as have a nice chat with the various players enabling these illegal transactions -- specifically, the consignment carriers and credit card companies whose logos are plastered all over the Web sites."
An FDA official told the Post his agency was trying to get a meeting going between the search engines and federal regulators. And the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the paper added, has decided to stretch a probe into Web pharmacies to include the role of those who advertise, buy, or transport illegal prescriptions.
