Battling a deadly enemy that’s only a click away

The fight against the global €28 billion illegal medicines racket is being waged every day at Irish borders and delivery depots, but is set to escalate further, writes Paul Kelly.

THE fight against the flood of illegal medicines arriving from abroad is a tough one - and looks like getting even tougher.

Customs officials and the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) are all that stands between Ireland and the illegal internet pharmacies that are part of a growing €28 billion-a-year global drugs racket.

Yesterday, the Irish Examiner revealed how easy it is to order 10 of the world’s most popular drugs on the internet - in clear contravention of Irish law.

No-one in the Republic is allowed to import (or have sent to them via the post) prescription-only medicines for personal use.

IMB director Dr Joan Gilvarry said: “The illegal sale of medicinal products through the internet is a problem for governments throughout the globe.

“Frequently, not only is Irish legislation being breached but also that of other countries from which the consignments are controlled, arranged and shipped.

“Often the product is supplied without the safeguards provided by legislation and (without) authorisation for supply.”

These internet pharmacies are often based abroad, putting them out of the reach of Irish law and hampering our efforts to stop the tide of medicines reaching Ireland.

Dr Gilvarry, however, remains upbeat about what can be done, citing international co-operation and her department’s role in helping to close nine websites abroad and three at home earlier this year.

“We are active in combating this problem in Ireland through close liaison with national and international law enforcement.

“The IMB have made very strong progress on tackling this area and have been involved in the closure of 12 websites illegally supplying medicinal products online.”

The battle against overseas internet pharmacies sees IMB officials liaising with gardaí and customs, and passing information to their counterparts abroad.

But judging by the ease with which the Irish Examiner was able to obtain medicines in the post from online pharmacies, the global battle will be difficult and long.

The UN’s International Narcotics Control Board has admitted that an increasing amount of its time is spent in the seemingly impossible task of fighting internet pharmacies.

At home, the battle against drugs from internet pharmacies is waged at air and sea ports, An Post depots and private parcels bases.

During 2005, customs and Ireland’s drugs law enforcers made 220 seizures of medicines as they were being imported into the country.

The most common medicines found were anabolic steroids, dangerous and controversial drugs used by bodybuilders to bulk out their physique.

Significant quantities of the internet’s number one medicine - the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra - were also seized.

Among the medical products impounded were fake condoms, which could have put people at greater risk of sexual diseases such as HIV.

On the front line are customs officials working at An Post depots and at other parcel carriers such as FedEx.

They check the letters, packets and parcels for medicines, guns, narcotics, pornography and even animals sent through the post.

But they face a massive task: every working day An Post alone handles four million items of mail - or one billion a year.

On any given day, the postal service handles 50,000 packets similar to those which contained the Irish Examiner’s haul of medicines.

A fifth of these packets - equating to 2.5 million a year - will come from abroad, including countries where our medicines were from.

Carriers such as FedEx, which was used to deliver Viagra, Tamiflu and Xenical to the Irish Examiner’s Cork offices, have their own depots with customs officers inspecting deliveries.

Customs officials are unable to inspect every package from abroad every year, and instead use a variety of techniques to snare contraband.

One customs official said: “By and large it is down to experience - we can tell (suspect parcels) from the size and shape and where it has come from.

“We do use intelligence so parcels from certain countries will be subject to more checks than ones from other places. There are also random checks and X-rays. We know from experience what to look out for.”

Between May and December last year customs officials inspecting foreign mail at Dublin Airport seized 498 items containing medicines and street drugs.

However, they were kept busiest by legal drugs such as tobacco - they seized more than 1.1 million cigarettes sent through the post to dodge excise duty.

During the same period, officials at the Dublin Mail Centre, which deals with surface mail and registered post, seized 12 packets containing medicines and handed them over to the Irish Medicines Board.

At An Post’s Portlaoise depot, which handles parcels heavier than 2kgs, customs examined 294,298 parcels between last May and December.

They stopped 153 parcels for detailed examination by the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) and seized 35 suspected of containing illegal medicine.

Customs can stop an illegal medicine reaching its final destination but the IMB has the job of stopping internet firms from sending the drugs in the first place.

The very nature of the internet - ungoverned and ungovernable - means the IMB has a massive task on its hands.

Typically, each arm of an internet pharmacy is in different jurisdictions, making the simplest of investigations an uphill battle.

It’s just like the classic fraud sting: the victim, the sender and the money are in three different jurisdictions - usually ones that have a poor track record of co-operating with one another.

So an IMB probe into a package that arrives from abroad could mean inquiries have to be made in several countries, all in different time zones and with varying laws.

Complicating this is the speed and size of the internet: sites can close down and then re-emerge later in a different jurisdiction and under a new banner.

Search engines such as Google remain a ready and quick source of details for websites selling medicines. Yet this could be stopped, too.

Google managed to bow to the Chinese government’s demands to censor certain information so why can the search engine not block out illegal internet pharmacies, child porn websites and racist forums?

Anecdotally at least, though, international law enforcement efforts to clamp down on internet medicines do seem to be having an effect.

Rogue websites are having to do the equivalent of jumping through hoops to get their products to patients, as our investigation showed.

Your order may be taken in US dollars on a Canadian website but the contact details on the site could include a US telephone number.

Eventually your parcel may arrive from the Netherlands, Britain or even an island in the Pacific Ocean, marked as a sample of merchandise or a low-value gift.

In the fight against the pharmacies, Ireland’s law enforcers have an additional battle strategy: one to capture the hearts and minds of a public whose belief in the internet seems unshakeable.

Dr Gilvarry said: “The strongest message we can send to consumers is not to use these sites for medicines.

“They should also understand that there are possible health risks posed by using these products.

“There can be no verification of what they contain or that they do the job they purport to do.”