I’ve previously predicted that the Ryan Haight Act will drive a lot of Scheduled sales into the “brown bag” model of selling from offshore with no pretense of prescriptions. I’m not the only one who thinks so:
[F]ederal law alone won’t stem the tide, said Mathea Falco, an industry analyst with a nonprofit group called Drug Strategies. Falco, who was assistant secretary of state for international narcotics matters during the Carter administration, said drug scofflaws will simply relocate to countries with less-stringent regulations if U.S. laws are tightened.
A rogue Web site could be operated by someone in Florida. Its server might be in Belarus, with the ownership registered in Mexico. The drugs could be shipped from Spain, with deposit payments made to a bank in the Cayman Islands.
This from the Columbus Dispatch.
Falco has an idea – prohibit credit card companies from processing payments to internet pharmacy sites.
Falco and colleague Philip Heymann are calling for a law barring financial institutions from allowing their payment systems to be used for Internet drug sales.
“It’s the payment methods where we can get the most immediate response,” Falco said. “If people can’t use MasterCard, Visa, American Express and PayPal, it will be much harder to make these sales.
Interesting idea in theory but is it practical? That’s the exact system that Visa and MasterCard have been using for years to try to block online gaming, an area in which I’ve done a lot of work. In the first part of this decade, online gaming in the U.S. processed many billions of dollars per year despite the banks refusal to process gaming coded transactions. Indeed, people made hundreds of millions of dollars devising systems to get around these blocks. I know because I represent some of them.
Moreover, online gaming already has a code – 7995. Online pharmacies can be coded as general internet sales, so the infrastructure is even weaker than in the gaming space. So it’s a lot harder to do than you might think.
Finally, think about the target of this regulation. At some point, one must admit that there is a customer base that wants to buy these drugs no matter how “illegal” that transaction might be. Those people aren’t going to mind buying from an offshore company and they aren’t going to mind paying via ACH transaction or some other system for avoiding payment blocks. The committed online gamblers do just that right now. So in the end, a payment block would be an enormous undertaking that probably would have a very marginal benefit.
One could easily argue, just like people argue in the gaming space, that the best way to protect the public is to recognize that people are going to engage in this activity and regulate it. Think iTunes instead of Napster. If it’s accessible enough, most people will use the regulated, safer version and we will end up protecting as many people as possible.
