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Sky_Queen
Fly Girl
Reged: 12/03/02
Posts: 1955
Loc: Texas
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Florida Pharmaceutical Supplier Raided By Feds
Florida Pharmaceutical Supplier Raided By Feds
Company Accused Of Illegal On-Line Prescription Drug Trafficking
POSTED: 6:51 PM EDT October 11, 2003
DAVIE, Fla. -- Federal agents raided a pharmaceutical supplier and seized boxes of pain medication at the company accused of sending prescription drugs to online customers who hadn't seen doctors.
C&H Wholesale Inc. sold at least 5.6 million doses of controlled substances to Internet pharmacies, including its own lifelinepharmacy.com, since May 2002, and the Web site sold 2.9 million doses to online customers in less than three months this year, a complaint said Friday.
Lifeline mailed pills to patients who had only filled out online forms and didn't visit doctors to get a prescription, including an undercover agent who posed as 17-year-old "Brittany" seeking diet pills, the Drug Enforcement Administration said.
"The owners, pharmacists and employees all have direct knowledge there is no legitimate physician-patient relationship," DEA investigators wrote.
The DEA suspended the company's federal license to deal in controlled substances in a regulatory action and moved to revoke the license. The company has 30 days to appeal.
C&H issued a statement saying the government has not been clear about the rules for online drug dispensing.
"To this date, the federal and state governments have provided insufficient guidance by which Internet pharmaceutical services can be administered," the statement said. "Yet it may well be the future of how health care prescriptions are filled."
C&H opened in 1999 and became a high-volume wholesaler of the sleeping pill Ambien and diet pills including amphetamines and phentermine, the DEA said. Lifeline opened in February and was filling 1,000 prescriptions a day from 50 online pharmacies. Both operations are owned by Frank and Amada Hernandez.
The same office building was home to RX Network, an Internet pharmacy that had its state license suspended in June.
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potatoboy99
Permanent Fixture
Reged: 02/04/03
Posts: 1159
Loc: Deep North (East)
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Wow thanks for posting that, Legitimate. Does this place sound familiar to anybody? With that kind of volume, they must have had their fingers in quite a few pies, so to speak.
Again it's a Florida crackdown story.
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[image]www.gifs.net/animate/rotglobe.gif[/image]
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plotinus
Enthusiast
Reged: 09/16/03
Posts: 271
Loc: California
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Thanks, Legitimate, for being so dilligent on the press releases. This is, I predict, the concentrated beginning of the Ashcroft crack-down on domestic OP's. Only the most stringent OP's will survive. But, like the failure of simplemindedness in Iraq, this attempt will only move the money from Florida to Mexico or Columbia or Brazil or maybe India.
As I've predicted many times, the demand is there. People want ambien, vicodin and oxycontin. None of these are terribly hard to mfg. But the DEA/FDA is intimidating doctors against prescribing them for chronic use. If domestic OP's in FL can't deliver, organizations with long, successful histories of delivering recreational drugs will deliver. And the delivery will be made from UPS depots in San Ysidro or El Paso or Brownsville.
The war on drugs is like the war on terrorism -- it can't be won, only small tactical victories will occur at tremendous expense to U.S. treasure (money and people). Long term, the WOD goes on forever, unless you give it up for a new approach.
Social Conservatives hate the idea of cost benefit analysis, when pitted against (their)morality. But, it really does come down to how much are we willing to pay for each pill intercepted, knowing that at best we're intercepting 10%. Sooner or later a rational being will reach the conclusion that it is better to treat the ~10% of the population that can't handle drugs and/or alcohol and forget spending ~$50B a year to arrest, try and incarcerate them. Especially, when arrest, conviction and incarceratation accomplishes nothing other than keeping a "dope-fiend" off the streets for several years at $50,000/year of your tax money. Where is the morality in this?
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"War on ...." is the wrong metaphor!
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Jeremiah
Agape GrandParent
Reged: 07/14/02
Posts: 705
Loc: U.S.A.
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Wow,Thanks for posting this story,Legitimate.
I'm not familiar with lifeline. Seems I've heard of C&H somewhere.Hmmm..
J.
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I can't see me lovin nobody but you,for all my life
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