| Top state law enforcement officials will seek to tweak a fairly new law during the upcoming Kentucky General Assembly in an attempt to further discourage the use of Internet pharmacies in the illegal drug trade.
Proposed legislation will require proof of an actual doctor-patient relationship and at least one physical examination in order for a person to order prescription pills. Proposed legislation will also make it a felony to receive the drugs from an Internet pharmacy without a legitimate reason or to sell fake medical records, said Attorney General Greg Stumbo.
Although an Internet pharmacy bill was passed and signed into law less than two years ago, Stumbo said the update is needed and predicts the law will almost certainly be updated in future sessions to close loopholes.
"We're seeing new ways pharmacies are trying to get around this law," he said in an interview last week.
Opiate-based prescription drugs have overtaken other drugs as the most abused forms. They top the list of drug overdoses, and their abuse has ravaged many Kentucky communities.
The 2005 Kentucky General Assembly passed the bill in part to regulate Internet pharmacies. Complaints from delivery service drivers that they were being accosted by those waiting for drugs helped lead to the passage of the current law.
Since July 2005, the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation has seized pills with a street value of more than $1 million.
The majority of the shipments came from Florida, said Kentucky Bureau of Investigation Commissioner David James. The Web sites are increasingly difficult to track because they may be up for only three or four days, and the operators can be spread throughout the world.
"The broker might be in Texas. The pharmacy might be in California. The money might be in Southeast Asia and the person making it might be in Russia," James said.
The current law forbids the sale and shipment of drugs in Kentucky by unlicensed out-of-state pharmacies. It also lays out several requirements, such as applying for state permits and maintaining records, to prevent illegal drug transactions.
However, the law does not address in great detail the people who receive the drugs shipped from the unlicensed pharmacies. Drug trafficking laws apply if the person is caught selling pills, but there is no provision to prosecute someone for receiving drugs from an unlicensed pharmacy, Stumbo said.
If passed, the new legislation would allow for a buyer to be charged with a Class D felony for a first offense and a Class C felony for each subsequent offense, Stumbo said.
Requiring a physical exam from a doctor and having an actual doctor-patient relationship will also help go after some of the "end-users" who receive the pills from the pharmacies, said Jon Marshall of the Kentucky State Police. Marshall sits on the attorney general's Internet pharmacy task force, which has worked on drafting a bill the attorney general plans to put before the next General Assembly.
"It's going to allow us to go after some of these end-users ... to show we mean business," he said.
When Marshall worked undercover last year, he spoke to doctors by telephone in Tampa, Fla., and told them he had pain in his left arm and upper back. They prescribed him pain pills without ever following up on his symptoms to rule out a heart attack or suggesting he get checked out by a physician.
With the proposed legislation, Marshall said, "We've got to be careful we're not hurting or damaging the legitimate mail-order pharmacies, but the ones that use brokers or contract with doctors to do these online medical examinations, they've got to go." | 
