October 6, 2021
42% of Americans now purchase prescription medications online
According to a recent survey by the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP), more and more Americans are buying prescription medications online. In 2021, 42% of Americans have bought medicines online for themselves or their family, which is 7% more than last year. While 49% of these people did it for the first time this year, mostly due to COVID-19 restrictions, 64% of them plan to keep doing it even after the pandemic because it's easy and affordable.
The ASOP survey also showed that more people are becoming aware of the risks of buying medicines online, with a 9% increase in awareness since 2020. Now, 38% of people claim to be informed about these risks. It's good to see that 49% of Americans talk to doctors, 30% talk to pharmacists, and 12% talk to nurses when looking for online pharmacies. But, there are still dishonest online sellers out there, and we need to do more to protect people when they search for medicines online.
Like ASOP, we at IALOP also believe that we need to do a lot more to show the difference between safe online pharmacies that sell real medicines from licensed, locally-regulated pharmacies and unsafe, "rogue" online sellers.
In the past five years, IALOP has led efforts to establish global standards for selling medicines online. We take part in yearly conferences like Rightscon and the Internet Governance Forum to spread the word about the increasing popularity and need for buying prescription medicines from online pharmacies. We have worked with scholars, activists, Internet policy experts, NGOs, and human rights advocates to create the BRUSSELS PRINCIPLES ON THE SALE OF MEDICINES OVER THE INTERNET, a framework for creating international rules. We continue to work with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network (I&JPN) to raise awareness of the benefits and dangers of the online pharmacy industry.
The 2021 Survey by ASOP on American Perceptions and Use of Online Pharmacies shows the urgent need to create standards and rules for safely buying medicines online from other countries. ASOP's report on how Americans are buying prescription drugs online provides a good picture of how people are using the internet to buy everything, a trend they called the "digitization of consumerism" in their survey last year. Now, it's important for everyone involved to work together to come up with procedures that everyone agrees with and understands. The survey clearly shows that people's habit of buying medicines online is here to stay and it shouldn't be stopped.