Coroners have raised alarm over increasing deaths linked to online prescription drugs, including super-strength opioids. The web-based chemists allow users to fill in a simple form to order the drugs, including opiates like fentanyl, morphine,Tramadol and OxyContin, sedatives such as Valium, as well as potentially dangerous slimming pills. A computer generates a prescription which is signed off by a doctor – often in another country – allowing the UK pharmacy to dispense them.
The practice is legal because EEA-qualified GPs and pharmacies are able to prescribe to any other EU citizen.
Other countries, including France and Italy, have banned patients from getting drugs prescribed online by doctors outside their national borders.
However, UK health officials are concerned that the regulatory systems in many other EU countries are not operated as rigorously as the UK’s, nor are doctors accountable to UK regulators if things go wrong.
An investigation by this paper reveals that over the past five years separate coroners have demanded urgent official action after linking at least 12 deaths to legal online prescription drugs.
In each case they have written to officials as well as the country’s top health bosses demanding measures are put in place to prevent future deaths.
One recent death, currently under investigation, involves someone who bought 3,700 codeine tablets from 21 UK registered online pharmacy sites.
Another includes the death of a student linked to a super-strength opiate – Acetylfentanyl – available only over the internet and so strong that, according to the coroner’s report, it is “more potent than heroin, morphine or fentanyl”.
In a third case Brighton and Hove coroner Victoria Hamilton-Deeley highlighted the death of Richard Breatnach, who died in Brighton in 2016 aged 31, after taking an overdose from a batch of highly-addictive dihydrocodeine tablets (an opiate twice as strong as codeine) that he bought after claiming he needed a migraine treatment.
He purchased the tablets through a Boltonbased online company.
They were signed off by a Bulgaria-based doctor after he filled in an online form – which took 15 minutes – on which he lied about his medical history.
And in February 2017, Geraint Williams, senior coroner for Worcestershire, wrote to the Health Secretary over the case of Bethany Shipsey, 21, who had died after overdosing on diet pills she had bought online.
Lynda Scammell, senior policy manager at the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, said it has major concerns about the number of deaths as a result of online prescribing.
She said: “We are working with other healthcare regulators to review legislation and identify the gaps that allow people to purchase unsafe and often large quantities of online prescription drugs by just ticking boxes online and without referral to their GP.
“The world is a different place – the internet has come along and it doesn’t recognise regulatory boundaries.”
