Amy Pain seemed to have everything going for her. Beautiful. Intelligent. Only 22. The daughter of a highly respected archdeacon of the Anglican Church in Wales.

Amy died after an accidental overdose of prescription drugs she had bought from a no-prescription pharmacy for insomnia, anxiety and stomach aches.

Her archdeacon father found the girl dead in her bed last October. Last week during an official inquest, coroner David Bowen cited the ease with which drugs could be purchased online without a prescription as a contributing factor in Amy’s death.

Read more about Amy’s story, and the larger problems of no-prescription pharmacies in the U.K., here.

The TV news report should serve as a warning to all of us.

Many rogue online pharmacies aren’t technically “no prescription” pharmacies — because they do have physicians on hand who write prescriptions for patients based on what are called “remote consultations.”

These online consultation pharmacies work with doctors who review a patient’s self-reported medical history — generally based on the completion of an online questionnaire — and then write a prescription in response to the patient’s request. U.S. states have different laws on what constitutes a valid doctor-patient consultation. However, as PharmacyChecker.com reports:

The American Medical Association and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have issued statements asserting that remote consultations are a substandard medical practice when there is no prior doctor-patient relationship, one established by an in-person physical exam.

No Prescription Needed does not permit online consultation pharmacies to be members of our network. While the standards of these pharmacies are higher, on the whole, than those of pharmacies that require no prescription at all, they still do not meet the safety standards that you deserve — and should demand — as a patient.

As has been reported by the Washington Post and others, online consultation pharmacies have a tendency to attract doctors with substance abuse problems, a history of malpractice, and a variety of financial woes.

The Post checked the background of prescribing physicians and found the following:

A Colorado doctor had a history of alcohol abuse. An Arkansas doctor was being treated for bipolar disorder and drug dependency. A Florida doctor had twice been cited for providing inadequate care to elderly patients, one of whom died. A Texas doctor was under investigation by the FBI for suspected Medicare fraud and later committed suicide. A California doctor was disciplined for operating under a fictitious name. A North Carolina doctor had held 22 jobs in five years.

Pharmacy site operators use Web sites like this one to recruit doctors in need of cash.

Don’t be fooled by a pharmacy that claims to distribute valid prescriptions over the Web. The only legitimate prescription is one your doctor writes for you after an in-person consultation.

One in four British doctors say they have treated patients for side effects produced by drugs purchased from rogue online pharmacies, such as no-prescription pharmacies, the U.K.’s Telegraph reported last week.

Physicians reported seeing patients who had experienced problems after buying a wide variety of drugs online, including medication for anxiety, insomnia and weight loss. Doctors also said they had seen patients who had side effects after buying fraudulent versions of Viagra or other sexual impotence medications.

More than 400 physicians responded to the survey by Britain’s GP Magazine.

Concluded Dr. Bill Beeby, prescribing lead for the British Medical Association’s GPs committee:

When it comes to buying drugs on the internet, it is a minefield. People just don’t know what they’d be getting.

Don’t step into the minefield of no-prescription pharmacies. It’s not worth the risk.

By signing up with No Prescription Needed, you can be sure the medications you order come from properly licensed Canadian pharmacies — so you can save while also staying safe.

Join now!

It’s a hypothetical scenario that we’ve heard time and again since 9-11. A suspected terrorist has been captured who has information that authorities need to thwart an imminent attack — such as the detonation of a nuclear bomb in an American city.

How far should we go to get their information? Should authorities be able to ignore Miranda rights? Detain without a warrant? Even torture the suspect?

It’s a difficult question, one with no easy answers. And in the world of spam-fighting, we are facing similar questions.

As Network World reports, a private company may have recently found the key to disabling one of the world’s largest spam networks, dubbed the Kraken network. Among other things, the Kraken network disseminates millions of spam emails advertising illegal online pharmacies.

TippingPoint, an IT security company, recently set a trap for the Kraken network — one that looks like it might have worked. But because of ethical and privacy considerations, they decided not to spring it.

According to Network World:

The Kraken … is a huge network of personal computers that have been infected with software that turns them into zombie systems under the control of a master program – a botnet. The Kraken botnet is used by criminals to generate spam.

TippingPoint researchers Pedram Amini and Cody Pierce “created a fake Kraken command-and-control server … honeypot that waited for connections from PCs infected with the bot.”
As a result, the scientists “monitored the incoming communications from Kraken bots for seven days.” They “listened and collected statistics for a week, and filtered out [for] the IP addresses and then the systems.”

Then “Pierce wrote code that would let him redirect infected PCs, or better yet, use the bot’s built-in update mechanism – something most malware includes – to remove Kraken.”

However, management at TippingPoint forbade the researchers from activating the cleaning code. They argued that although it might be nice to interfere with the botnet, the law in the U.S. forbids unauthorized access to anyone’s computers, including zombies.

That’s right — because it’s illegal to access a computer without authorization from the owner, TippingPoint decided not to fight fire with fire. It’s a classic example of bringing a knife to a gunfight — operating under a more restrictive set of rules than our enemy.

It’s difficult to win when the battle is not being fought on an even playing field. Which has been exactly the argument in favor of dismissing niceties like the Geneva Convention when dealing with terrorists.

Network World argues that TippingPoint’s decision was the right one, for two reasons:

1. Releasing programs that modify other people’s systems without permission, even with the best of intentions, is a prescription for disaster…

2. Accessing someone else’s computer without permission is illegal. Period.

What do you think?