In Maryland, how hard is it to start an online pharmacy?

Factual Questions
1

For instance, I use LEGAL online pharmacies for pain medication because I have chronic lower back pain. They are all located in Florida for some reason. I take it there must be no law against prescribing schedule III narcotics over the telephone/internet down there or else the DEA would’ve shut them down long ago.

Are there laws against it here in Maryland or is this strictly Federal?

Also, if there aren’t, what would be stopping me from a legal standpoint from designing a order placement site (not just for painkillers, but for everything that is legal to prescribe over the phone), hiring a doctor and giving him 3/4 of the consult fees? This seems like what they do on other sites.

2

I would imagine the first problem is that you would have to be a registered pharmacist in Maryland to start.

Once you get your pharmacy license, you will probably have learned enough to a pretty good handle on where to research the other issues.

Good luck in pharmacy school.

3

But the thing is, you are just basically a middle man. What happens is this, you go to my site, place your “consultation”, I submit it to a Doctor, the Doctor calls you and send it to a pharmacy, they FedEx it to you. So you’re not really a pharmacy at all, you are just a window to get a consultation.

4

To recap this Scheme of the Day you simply need:

1 real doctor with serious ethical issues and a reckless sense of adventure with lawyers on retainer.

1 pharmacy with full staff and an unusually high inventory of Schedule II drugs willing to ship just about anywhere anytime.

You simply convince them that you have a special business plan and you can set up a website to enable internet communication between the colluding parties (in reality, you just get an e-mail when people place an order and then you slyly text message your doctor friend to work out the “transaction”)

This whole thing is very similar to regular drug dealing except at least two of the parties have licenses to lose among other things (not you though. that is the beauty of it).
I have to break it to you. Those existing fancy drug consultation sites are highly illegal if anyone ever got the motivation to do something about it. The “doctors” aren’t even in the U.S. The drugs get shipped from India or some other exotic locale in an unmarked envelope with the drugs only in their bubble blister-packs. The drugs are real but they can take months to arrive and I am sure you can get busted for ordering them.

I can’t see a totally U.S. based business being allowed anywhere in the states at least for the purposes that many people want to use them for.

5

It’s possible they’re in Florida not because of differences around schedule drugs (which is federal, right?) but tax laws.

6

Ask yourself if this would work if you had a store. Now try to answer the question of why you think the Internet has different laws.

Just because something has not yet been shut down doesn’t make it legal.