<story><title>FedEx Charged With Shipping Drugs For Illegal Online Pharmacies</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/07/17/332400444/fedex-charged-with-shipping-drugs-for-illegal-online-pharmacies?sc=tw</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>This is stupid.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had severe asthma since I was a small child. It&amp;#x27;s hospitalized me a couple of times. I&amp;#x27;m fairly healthy now, but I still try to keep a rescue inhaler within 20 minutes&amp;#x27; reach all the time, because something might still trigger an asthma attack and it can get deadly really fast.&lt;p&gt;Those stupid inhalers have only gotten more expensive and more difficult to get over the years. Sans insurance, a few years ago I used OTC Primatine, which wasn&amp;#x27;t great, but mostly did the job. Then those were all banned in the U.S. because of the accelerant they used and nothing showed up to take their place. (Oh, except for homeopathic rescue inhalers, now sold on shelves at major drugstores throughout the U.S. -- so just to bruise this dead horse a little bit more, in the U.S. real emergency medication for a common medical condition is hard to get, but magic water for the same thing is available everywhere.)&lt;p&gt;After paying a visit to a doctor and going through the whole 20 minute interview and all that nonsense, I can be given a prescription for a $70 inhaler.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Or&lt;/i&gt;, knowing exactly what I need, I could order it from a Canadian pharmacy where the cost of exactly the same inhaler &lt;i&gt;is less than the cost of shipping&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;$70 and a doctor&amp;#x27;s visit isn&amp;#x27;t a big deal for me anymore. But a few years ago it was, and it still is for an awful lot of people.</text></comment>
<story><title>FedEx Charged With Shipping Drugs For Illegal Online Pharmacies</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/07/17/332400444/fedex-charged-with-shipping-drugs-for-illegal-online-pharmacies?sc=tw</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>absherwin</author><text>From an internal memo about more stringent credit policies for internet pharmacies:
&amp;quot;Many of these companies operate outside of federal and state regulations over the sale of controlled drugs, which require diagnosis and prescription by a licensed physician. Drugs purchased from these sites may be diluted or counterfeit.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;To believe that FedEx lacked knowledge of illegal activity, one must believe that they assumed some of these pharmacies were genuine and that while it was feasible to create special policies to ensure FedEx was paid, policies to verify the organizations legitimacy (which would also increase the chance of them being paid), were impractical. However, that will be difficult because one executive told another that: &amp;quot;...these types of accounts will &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; result in a loss at some point. They have a very short lifespan and will eventually be shut down by the DEA.&amp;quot; (emphasis added)&lt;p&gt;They certainly can&amp;#x27;t argue, as many others in this thread have, that the companies weren&amp;#x27;t identifiable: They were doing it to enforce this policy. The credit department maintained a list of pharmacies that, at one time, had 600 entries on it.</text></comment>