The Cold Turnkey

Many Americans are still buying medications this way in order to save money.

If you plan to be one of them, be warned: There are a lot of Internet businesses making bogus claims to be Canadian pharmacies when they are actually shipping who-knows-what pills from all over the world without prescriptions. Buying online increases the chance that you’re getting a contaminated or counterfeit product, or one with the wrong dosage. Online pharmacy sites have to be tightly regulated.

Planet Drugs Direct does not appear to be one of these. It requires a prescription for controlled medications, which is something any reputable pharmacist does.

And it’s certified by the Canadian International Pharmacy Association, a professional organization. The prescriptions are filled through the Coastal Canada Pharmacy in Surrey, British Columbia, which is licensed by the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia, the government authority for pharmacists.

And the Web site is approved by Pharmacy Checker, which is a requirement to advertise on Google and elsewhere.

But although Canadian pharmacies are tightly regulated, just as they are in the U.S., Planet Drugs Direct is not accredited by the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites program, which was launched by the U.S.-based National Association of Boards of Pharmacy in 1999 to help gauge the reliability of online pharmacies in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere.

The Partnership for Safe Medicines, a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to protecting consumers from counterfeit medicines, issued the following statement regarding recent reports released by LegitScript, an online pharmacy verification service, and KnujOn, an Internet compliance company, which found that 80 to 90 percent of search engine-sponsored advertisements of online drug pharmacies violate federal and state laws, including selling substandard or counterfeit drugs to unsuspecting consumers.