The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7469 p285
15 September 2007

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European governments agree on minimum standards for selling medicines by mail order

Mail order selling of medicines via the internet should be restricted to community pharmacies that are open to the public, the Council of Europe has decided. It believes that this will facilitate patient counselling.

Last week, the council adopted a resolution setting out standards that it said all signatory countries should adopt as a minimum. Individual states could set more restrictive standards if they so wished.

Among them were standards for the minimum information that websites should provide and standards for delivery. The resolution also called for mandatory systems for warning patients about possible adverse effects.

The resolution also stated that mail order pharmacies should provide counselling by e-mail or by telephone in the language of the country in which the person placing the order lived.

The council is of the view that the only way that people can be protected from the hazards of illegal medicine sales is to make sure that legal online pharmacy websites are clearly differentiated from illegal ones.

Daniel Lee, managing director of Pharmacy2u said: “Pharmacy2U welcomes any guidance for distributing medicines via mail order and this dovetails very nicely with the professional standards and guidance for internet pharmacies recently released by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

“However, this still relies on the consumer making a choice between legal and illegal websites and more needs to be done by regulatory authorities worldwide to close down online pharmacies operating illegally, either by targeting their hosting environments or as happens in the US preventing the product crossing national borders.”