Recently, an illegal drug distribution network in Spain that sold more than 60 types of different products through the Internet has been dismantled. These drugs came from clandestine Asian laboratories and arrived in Spain from India through a parcel service located in the Port of Santa María (Cádiz).
Most of them were marketed as products for erectile dysfunction and for weight loss, but their composition will not be known until the corresponding authorities perform the necessary chemical analyses.
This organization used sophisticated technical means that have made police investigations take more than half a year. All the information they used circulated through what is known as “deep Internet”. Through the use of encrypted communications, hidden pages to search engines and the use of virtual currencies such as bitcoin among other things, they made the police investigations very difficult, but finally they were discovered and the network disarticulated. 25 people have been arrested throughout the Spain and 400,000 units of 62 different types of drugs have been intervened.
The different medications were sold to consumers in nightclubs and brothels.
Is it illegal to buy drugs online?
It is not illegal, as long as we do it through Internet pages that belong to pharmacies authorized to sell on the Internet.
Current legislation allows:
- Sell medications online only to pharmacies that have been authorized for this type of sale
- Only medicines that do not need a prescription
If as Internet users we decide to buy drugs online, we can visit this page of the Spanish Agency of Medicines where we will find a search engine to locate the authorized pharmacies of our province.
All the authorized pages for the sale of online medications must show the following logo established by the European Union that identifies them as pharmacies enabled for this purpose. More information in this press release from the Medicines Agency.
Risks when buying from unauthorized Internet sites
The purchase of drugs of all kinds on the Internet is a growing phenomenon in e-commerce which concerns health authorities for the health risks involved.
Medicines that have not passed any quality control or sanitary supervision can become a simple scam or they can be very dangerous for different reasons.
- Doses of the active ingredient higher than recommended can cause, for example, heart problems in the case of drugs for erectile dysfunction.
- Lower doses will be a simple scam.
- Both the active ingredients and other components that accompany drugs can be wrong or simply adulterated by other cheaper ones that could be useless or even harmful.
In addition, using the pages intended for the illegal sale of these products is also risky due to our computer security. They are often plagued by malicious programs, phishing pages, fake shops that only seek to steal our data and even stores that have been created simply to steal our money because the order will never arrive.