Newsweek – On February 20, 2024, a 45-year-old United States Army National Guard veteran visited a pill identification website, where she searched “M 30 blue and round.”
The woman, who had who served for 12 years, thought she was buying the painkiller oxycodone, and the website indicated that pills with these features were oxycodone. The decision to buy them proved fatal.
Five days later, her mother found her unresponsive in bed with 46 of the pills at her bedside. Emergency services were called. When they arrived at the home, the woman was pronounced dead. Testing later revealed the blue pills were made of fentanyl.
The unnamed victim was one of nine people listed in a September 2024 federal indictment against 18 defendants.
These defendants, located in the United States, Dominican Republic and India, allegedly advertised, sold, manufactured and shipped millions of deadly pills marketed as legitimate pharmaceuticals via nine websites.
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These sites were seized by federal investigators, putting a stop to their illicit pill peddling.
However, months later, many unlicensed pharmacies purporting to sell pharmaceutical drugs to unwitting customers are still thriving despite the efforts by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to stop them. These include nine websites that appear to be linked to one of the nine that federal authorities previously identified and seized.
Fake online pharmacies thriving despite DEA crackdown Newsweek Illustration/Canva
Marya Lieberman, an analytical chemist at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in the detection of substandard and falsified pharmaceuticals, said regulators face a daunting task to remove these illicit sites.
“To protect patients, DEA and FDA try to identify fake pharmacy sites and shut them down, but it’s like playing Whac-A-Mole—as soon as they take one site down, another one pops up,” she told Newsweek.
The Illicit Drug Market
The issue of drug safety has come to the fore as more Americans than ever turn to online pharmacies …