Cheap Medicine A Click Away? Beware
The next time you're tempted to save a few dollars by ordering cheap prescription drugs from Canada off internet sites, CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart reports, you might want to remember where millions of those drugs were actually made.
In a photo made available to CBS News, which was on the Internet, a man in the shorts is no technician. He's a felon with a drug conviction. And what you may have thought was Canada was just a rented house in Belize that looks like it could use a good cleaning.
Today federal prosecutors charged 11 people and an Atlanta based company with a scheme to sell phony drugs over the internet, promising big savings.Read the FDA's Consumer Safety Guide To Buying Medicine Online.
"Consumers thought they were getting legitimate and safe prescription drugs over the internet from Canada at a reduced price," U.S. Attorney David Nahmias says. "When, in fact, they were receiving adulterate fake drugs that were crudely made in an unsanitary house in Belize."
Millions were sold, including 24 drugs passed off as the most popular brands like Lipitor and Viaga. Investigators say it's not clear what was actually in them.
"That may not be Lipitor. It may not be Lipitor that's regulated in the manufacture," Nahmias says. "It may not be doing for your body what you expect it to be doing."
Prosecutors say they don't yet know of anyone who got sick by taking the fake drugs. The harm, they suggest, might be that victims missed taking the right ones.