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Posted by: William Myers in prescription pharmacy on September 20th, 2011

Onlinepharmacylist.net has been moved to Onlinepharmacylist.com. This is a very unfortunate matter and we want to take the time to explain what happened and why.

Apparently the domain registrar decided to disable the domain because the website was not approved by a third-party, private US company that monitors online pharmacies. Obviously, this website is not an online pharmacy since we don’t sell anything. Furthermore, this site explicitly states that US residents are not allowed to use this website and our outbound links programmatically filtered US traffic to enforce this rule. We even published articles to help US consumers understand the laws in their country and referred them to their FDA’s website. Nevertheless, the domain registrar is US based and refuses to release the domain, regardless of our due diligence.

Unfortunately, in the last few years, the internet has been flooded with websites that sell counterfeit drugs or sell controlled medicine without concern for public health. Many of these websites are dangerous since they dispense prescription medicine without requiring review by a licensed doctor. These types of websites do not even follow the laws of their own country. Our website was created to help identify these types of websites by accepting user reviews and blacklisting websites that are scams. To make the problem worse, many of these rogue websites infringed on the trademarks of drug manufacturers and were spammed all over the internet. This got the attention of major US and non-US pharmaceutical companies and government agencies.

This chaotic situation is what has created the justification for private US companies to begin designating websites as either “legal” or “illegal”. One of the main problems with this designation is that they require the pharmacy operator to pay a large sum of money to receive “Certification” that they are indeed legal. The second main problem is that their definition only applies to the US standards, so if a pharmacy is based in another (less expensive) country, then they are designated as illegal because they don’t follow US standards. In theory, this probably would improve public safety but it also hurts the consumer since the lower cost generics are from online pharmacies that are not approved by the private US companies. There is also collateral damage, such as legitimate sites/domains that provide information about these lower cost international pharmacies. For the spammers who are responsible for the actual danger, having a domain disabled doesn’t mean anything. They just register a new domain and begin spamming it. These spammers are anonymous and basically impossible to hold accountable. Conversely, legitimate sites are essentially destroyed by having their domain disabled.

We hope that this provides some insight into the situation. After this latest attack to our site by the domain registrar, we must consider whether it is worth the time and effort to continue operating. This website was originally founded to help people without health insurance obtain medication for which they had a valid prescription for less money. That should be a legal and legitimate purpose. However, given this latest development, it is impossible to achieve our original objective. We think that people without health insurance are going to need to find a way to get the money to pay for their prescriptions or learn to live without them.

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