Prescriptions on the PC are focus of Senate hearing

March 21, 2000
Web posted at: 3:48 a.m. EST (0848 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Getting hold of prescription drugs often can be as easy as pointing and clicking on your computer, a fact which has grabbed the attention of a Senate subcommittee.

Members of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee are scheduled to hear testimony Tuesday on Internet pharmacies "to see if there are problems with regulations," said a spokesman for the panel.

For patients, the convenience of going online and filling out a simple questionnaire, then having a prescription drug delivered to their home, is far greater than traveling to visit a doctor.

That's one of the major questions legislators want to probe: Are licensed doctors actually prescribing drugs? And, is there a greater risk that patients will get counterfeit drugs from these prescription Web sites?

To keep within some state laws, some online drug stores provide their own doctors, often licensed offshore, to write prescriptions after a cursory look at a medical history supplied by the patient.

Of course not all Internet pharmacies engage in the practice of selling drugs to just anyone. There are those who do play by the rules, that as of now are enforced by individual states.

Companies like planetrx.com have been licensed to sell drugs in all 50 states and have established mail order prescription businesses that require prescriptions be written by a doctor and even called in by a physician.

The FDA, which regulates and oversees approval of all U.S. prescription drugs, has neither the money, nor the power to oversee what it calls "rogue" Internet sites that write prescriptions to just about anyone," a source told CNN.

Last July, a House subcommittee heard testimony from the FDA asking similar questions to those that will be asked on Capitol Hill Tuesday: Who's minding the store? And what enforcement action is being taken against online stores that dispense drugs without legitimate prescriptions.

At the end of last year, President Clinton proposed strengthening FDA authority over Internet drug stores, giving the agency new subpoena and enforcement powers and an extra $10 million to fund them.

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