hose pills offered via spam mail in your inbox each day? Don't buy them.
"Regulators and drug industry executives are pulling their hair out trying to stem a rising tide of fake or low-quality medicines being sold online," we wrote two years ago. "A Web site based in Canada may get its products from India or China, or may traffic in counterfeits."
At the time, Pfizer executive Jeff Kindler -- now the drug giant's chief executive -- complained that it was impossible to track where these medicines came from. "All you get is a plain brown envelope," he said.
The problem seems to be getting worse. China just executed its former head drug regulator for taking bribes in a crackdown on fake medicines. Tainted batches of pet food and toothpaste of Chinese origin are a reminder of how easy it is for poisonous products to make their way stateside.
Now, a death has been linked to poison pills from an online pharmacy, according to the Globe and Mail. Marcia Bergeron, 58, of Vancouver Island, Canada, bought drugs containing the active ingredients in Ambien, Xanax, and Tylenol. But the medicines also contained high levels of metals that built up in her system and caused an arrythmia that killed her.
Bergeron reportedly ordered the drugs from a Web site that claimed to be Canadian and had previously been flagged by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for selling counterfeits.
The FDA recently put out a warning on the dangers of Internet medicines. Peter Rost, a former Pfizer executive whose blog is an annoyance to drug execs, notes an "irony" in the situation: that the first victim of drug reimportation lives in Canada, and got a drug that is not approved there but is available to the rest of the world.
As for the spammers who sell this stuff, they can be nearly impossible to track, as this Forbes story details.
Orac, the pseudynomous surgeon at ScienceBlogs, reports that he's seen particularly scary spam. "Did you know that spammers are claiming to be selling chemotherapeutic agents from India?" he writes.