Buying from mail order pharmacies is an economic necessity. I think you may be a bit to0 blanket in your condemnation of these pharmacies. I am getting drugs from the major Indian pharmaceutical firms such as Cipla and Intex. Generally I can tell if the drug is working. It’s pretty easy with blood pressure drugs. I trust drugs from a big Indian pharma more than I trust a Philippine generic and it will cost me half the price.

Is this ideal — no. Do I wish I could have American or European big pharma drugs? Of course, but it’s just not possible. They would cost ten times as much and may well be manufactured in India or China where the vast majority of raw pharmaceutical ingredients are made. My genuine Lipitor is made in Turkey.

One of the on-line pharmacies I have dealt with cannot accept credit cards, only EFT payments. Despite the concerns, they are promptly shipping me drugs from Cipla, Intas and so forth. To have all these outfits hounded out of existence will not help me or others who depend on them.

Certain economic interests have been blocking this education since the 1920s, but we can’t do without it, and be competitive, and keep our head above hot water(financially).

I truly believe the next big change in thinking about economics will be the working man’s ownership of the place he/she works, and the change of medical care to non-profits. It is the only way to bring back the middle class, and control medical costs, which are completely out of control now.

Instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it will be the ownership of the proletariat. To make good decisions, these concepts will have to be introduced early in life, and ingrained at the secondary school level.

In many cases, these are people who don’t go to their doctors. The generic drugs being sold online are MORE expensive than the ones sold in local pharmacies — but they are sold without prescriptions. So if those drugs are ineffective, but the person taking them doesn’t get cholesterol levels or blood pressure checks, he won’t know he’s taking worthless pills.

And most of drugs for chronic diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure are to prevent long term consequences. You would need to do a long term study to know if there were more people getting strokes or going on dialysis. How would you do a study of people who -don’t- go to doctors?

If those people do suffer consequences despite buying drugs for their condition on line, it’s not going to be detected. As far as anyone knows, they weren’t taking drugs. They had no prescriptions, saw no doctors, and bought the drugs illegally. No one will know they were paying for ineffective drugs instead of just not taking any at all.

And if the drugs they take are toxic, again, who will know? Do you imagine that every person who dies gets an extensive post mortem exam like Michael Jackson’s? Mostly, the medical examiner’s office calls the person’s last physician for a history, finds out he had diabetes and heart disease and never kept appointments or took medications, and signs the death certificate as death due to natural causes. There could be thousands of deaths among people with known chronic diseases, and no one would notice it.

I propose that privately owned associations would be more successful. We already do that with GREAT success in the US in the service market – as in power, internet, and phone service! These are non-profit organizations, but my family has already benefited from the estate of my mother after she passed away, and our phone/telco association paid out the profit of the estate. We own telephone, internet, satellite, and cable TV service; notice I way WE own it! And we show up to the meetings and vote for our proxies, and have a say in day to day operations too!

Foreigners may be ahead of us in technical education, but they are FAR behind in economical education. Believe me – I love and respect the peoples of the world, but nobody beats the USA!

Now, there are exceptions. High-fear sales (e.g., ransomware) or high-demand sales (like Oxycodone). In the first case consumers can be sufficiently worried about their personal liability that they’re willing to do something very unfamiliar (e.g., go get a paysafecard at their supermarket). In the later case, consumers are driven seekers and can be willing to entertain a wider variety of options to get what they want. Thus, online gambling is still eminently fundable without Visa/MC if you’re sufficiently interested to find out how (but losing Visa/MC eliminated the revenue from all the casual US gamblers).