Today, we released another report, co-authored with Internet compliance guru KnujOn, detailing our concerns with search advertisements for rogue Internet pharmacies, focusing this time on Yahoo online advertisements. Our report indicates that more than 80% of Yahoo’s Internet pharmacy ads that we reviewed were operating contrary to US federal and state laws.

So, what did we find? Well, first, we indicate that we purchased prescription drugs without a valid prescription from Yahoo Internet pharmacy ads, including of potentially habit-forming medications. In one case, the drugs came from India. (The direct importation of medicines from outside of the US, including India, is prohibited by law.)

The report also touches on PharmacyChecker.com, Yahoo!’s Internet pharmacy verification service. We were able to get prescription drugs without a prescription from an Internet pharmacy (in this case, shopeastwest.com) approved by PharmacyChecker and listed on PharmacyChecker.com. The drugs also came from India. (This wasn’t the first time, as we note in a previous blog or two.)

Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft require their Internet pharmacy advertisers to be verified as legitimate by PharmacyChecker.

Dan Pearson, father of Justin Pearson, after whom Minnesota’s Internet pharmacy law is named, said, “My daily trip to the cemetery to visit my son only reinforces my resolve to address this national travesty. The search engines have said for years that they are taking effective steps to stop no-prescription-required Internet pharmacies from advertising. Until they get serious about this, parents like myself will continue to bury our children.”

In an earlier report, we announced that we had purchased prescription drugs without a prescription, and been sent counterfeit medications, from bing.com online pharmacy advertisers. A few days after Microsoft responded that it had manually reviewed its pharmacy ads and removed all offenders, KnujOn announced that it had conducted yet another purchase of addictive drugs from a bing.com advertiser without a valid prescription.

Furthermore, our report tackles the issue of “licensed Canadian Internet pharmacies.” Yahoo’s policy requires Internet pharmacy advertisers to be “based in” the United States or Canada. The report reviewed three Internet pharmacies that were approved as advertisers based on having a Canadian pharmacy license. In all three cases, the Internet pharmacies indicated that the drugs would actually be shipped from places like India, Singapore or Barbados, not Canada.

To drive this point home, in one case, an Internet pharmacy advertiser approved as a licensed Canadian Internet pharmacy (CheapoDrugs.com) stated that it could fill prescriptions anywhere in the world except for Canada, because prescription drug importation illegal in Canada.

The report indicates that over the last year and a half, three national organizations, including the American Pharmacists Association, National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, and National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, had written to all three search engines to warn them that they were profiting from ads placed by online pharmacies that sell prescription drugs without requiring a valid prescription, or that illegally import drugs from outside of the United States, increasing the possibility that the medicines are counterfeit or adulterated.

“We’re making this a public issue because it’s time for this to stop,” KnujOn President Garth Bruen said. “If the search engines continue to knowingly facilitate illegal prescription drug sales, then we’ll continue to issue these reports. Our reports stop when the problem is fixed.”

“Yahoo! needs to require that its Internet pharmacy ads adhere to US laws and National Association of Boards of Pharmacy standards,” LegitScript President John Horton said. “These are the same standards that govern brick-and-mortar pharmacies used throughout the US everyday. Shouldn’t American Internet users be assured of the same safeguards online?”

According to government data, prescription drug abuse is now the second largest drug abuse problem in the United States, with more primary abusers than methamphetamine, powder cocaine, crack cocaine heroin, ecstasy, PCP and LSD combined. Counterfeit drugs are estimated to be a $32 billion dollar industry.

LegitScript is the only Internet pharmacy verification organization in the United States identified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy as adhering to its standards for certifying Internet pharmacies as safe and legitimate. KnujOn tracks Internet criminality and has succeeded in removing over 100,000 spam websites from the Internet.