Drugs just a click away: online pharmacies can make dangerous drugs easy to get, but also can promote better health care. Should we regulate them?

State Legislatures, June, 2007 by Brand, Rachel

Ryan Haight didn't have to lurk in a deserted parking lot or hang around the high school boys' bathroom to buy drugs. The college-bound 17-year-old placed his order on a computer in the family den. He ordered 100 tablets of hydrocodone--a generic for the powerful painkiller Vicodin--from an online pharmacy on Dec.

6, 2000. Two months later, his mother found him dead in his bedroom. In his blood was a mixture of hydrocodone and morphine ordered from www.nationpharmacy.com. The pills were "prescribed" by a doctor in Texas, fulfilled by an Oklahoma pharmacy, and delivered to ...