What is the deal with the multitude of internet drug sites that send me e-mails offering to ‘prescribe’ highly addictive painkillers to me without even a phone call? Hydrocodone, Vicodin, and Oxycontin by mail?
Isn’t this really dangerous, as well as just flat-out wrong? Are these real doctors doing this? If ever there was a place for government regulation, it might just be here. Maybe.
Most of them are based in foreign countries. Some of them have a corrupt doctor on staff that will write prescriptions for anyone that orders it. Some of them don’t have a doctor at all. They fill the orders and mail them in a nondescript envelope so that the USPS will not intercept it. I am sure that some of the sites are scams and just take your money and run.
I have some experience with this process (don’t ask me how). The drug was ordered from a web site, filled in India with the real drug still sealed in the manufacturer’s package, and delivered almost 4 months later in a plain brown package with the address hand written.
So, some of them will do as advertised but it is very illegal to have them mailed into the U.S.