Consumer Health Essays - Pharmaceuticals Policy, Online Pharmacy

Consumer Health Essays - Pharmaceuticals Policy, Online Pharmacy Consumer Health Is Consumer Health and Safety in Jeopardy With the implementation of Self-Prescription Drug Internet Sites? Amanda C. Feitner GUS 72-001: Urban Affairs-Consumers In the Marketplace: Your Legal Rights and Responsibilities. Prof. John E. Kelly, J.D. April 17, 2000 The expeditious augmentation of consumer product transactions taking place on the Internet have developed new risk for the public's health and safety, especially with the rise of online self-prescription drug sites. Online Pharmacies have been created to benefit the consumer but pose many risks for credulous purchasers, increased health fraud, and unique challenges to regulators, law enforcement, and policymakers. With these latest technological advancements, former regulations utilized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concerning the distribution of prescription and over the counter drugs have to some extent become obsolete. This has required that the FDA along with the combined efforts of other organizations such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), create new regulations to protect consumers. The evolution of online prescription Internet sites has brought several advantages to consumers, allowing individuals to attain ever-increasing amounts of knowledge to improve their understanding of health issues and treatment options. Last year alone more than 22 million Americans used the Internet to find medical information. According to Investor's Business Daily, 43% of web surfers access health care data online each year. Health concerns are the sixth most common reason people use the Internet, and according to the market research firm, Cyber Dialogue Inc., this number is growing 70 percent a year. The leading attractions to purchasing consumer products online are speed, privacy, ease of choosing and ordering products, and reduction in possible prescription errors with the use of computer technology to transmit prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies. Other benefits include: lower prices through increased competition among licensed sellers; greater availability of drugs for people with difficulties causing inability to get to the pharmacy or people who may live a great distance from the pharmacy; the ease of comparative shopping among many sites to find the best prices and products; and greater convenience and variety of products for all customers who prefer online ordering of drugs. While there seems to be vast amounts of benefits with these online drug prescription sites for consumers, the public must remember that they are at risk from avaricious sites or individuals that run them, which do not have the best interests of the consumer in mind. Over approximately 200 domestic sites have been identified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and the American Medical Association identified over 400 sites that both dispense and offer a prescribing service, half of which are located in foreign countries. This sizeable variety of companies, which are expanding everyday, give rise to numerous concerns for the consumer and challenges for government at both state and federal levels. Such concerns include illegal sale of drugs not approved by the FDA, distribution of counterfeit drugs, prescription drugs dispensed without a valid prescription, fatal interactions between drugs that may occur because of sites only requiring one to fill out a questionnaire to obtain the prescribed drug without prior knowledge of medical history, and products marketed with fraudulent health claims. The unique qualities of the Internet, including its broad reach, relative anonymity, and ease of creating new websites or removing old ones, pose new challenges for the enforcement of existing laws. The technological advancements of electronic commerce have outdated the establishment of the FDA and its system of drug regulation as it exists today. The FDA's system of drug regulation reviews new drugs to assess their safety and efficacy. In addition, it only permitted licensed health care professionals with the necessary education and training to administer prescription drugs, which reduced the risks that may occur from lack of knowledge by individuals without the proper credentials. The global nature of the Internet and the ability for websites to be made up of several related sites and links allows illegal transactions to occur readily thereby placing consumers health and safety at extreme peril. The occurrence of illegal transactions from online pharmacies becomes possible because foreign sites can be accessed and used to obtain drug prescriptions. Foreign countries have different drug regulations than those in America and create a difference in the legality of all existing

Learn How Separation of Powers Balances the Government

Learn How Separation of Powers Balances the Government The term separation of powers originated with the Baron de Montesquieu, a writer from the 18th-century French enlightenment. However, the actual separation of powers amongst different branches of government can be traced to ancient Greece. The framers of the United States Constitution decided to base the American governmental system on this idea of three separate branches: executive, judicial, and legislative. The three branches are distinct and have checks and balances on each other. In this way, no one branch can gain absolute power or abuse the power they are given. In the United States, the executive branch is headed by the President and includes the bureaucracy. The legislative branch includes both houses of Congress: the Senate and the House of Representatives. The judicial branch consists of the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. The Fears of the Framers One of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, Alexander Hamilton was the first American to write of the balances and checks that can be said to characterize the American system of separation of powers. It was James Madisons scheme that differentiated between the executive and legislative branches. By having the legislature divided into two chambers, Madison argued that they would harness political competition into a system that would organize, check, balance, and diffuse power. The framers endowed each branch with distinct dispositional, political, and institutional characteristics, and made them each answerable to different constituencies. The biggest fear of the framers was that the government would be overwhelmed by an imperious, domineering national legislature. The separation of the powers, thought the framers, was a system that would be a machine that would go of itself, and keep that from happening. Challenges to the Separation of Powers Oddly, the framers were wrong from the outset: the separation of powers has not led to a smoothly working government of the branches that compete with one another for power, but rather political alliances across the branches are confined to party lines that hinder the machine from running. Madison saw the president, courts, and Senate as bodies who would work together and fend off power grabs from the other branches. Instead, the division of the citizens, the courts, and the legislative bodies into political parties have pushed those parties in the U.S. government into a perpetual struggle to aggrandize their own power in all three branches. One great challenge to the separation of powers was under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as part of the New Deal created administrative agencies to lead his various plans for recovery from the Great Depression. Under Roosevelts own control, the agencies wrote rules and effectively created their own court cases. That enabled the agency heads to select optimal enforcement to establish agency policy, and since they were created by the executive branch, that in turn greatly enhanced the power of the presidency. The checks and balances can be preserved, if people pay attention, by the rise and maintenance of a politically insulated civil service, and constraints by Congress and the Supreme Court on agency leaders. Sources Levinson DJ, and Pildes RH. 2006. Separation of Parties, Not Powers. Harvard Law Review 119(8):2311-2386.Michaels JD. 2015. An Enduring, Evolving Separation of Powers. Columbia Law Review 115(3):515-597.Nourse V. 1999. The Vertical Separation of Powers. Duke Law Journal 49(3):749-802.