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OTTAWA, Canada - A coalition of Canadian pharmacists and patients have called on the Regional Coroner for Vancouver Island to hold an inquest into the death of a woman who died after apparently taking counterfeit pills she had ordered online.

Coroner Rose Stanton, Regional Coroner for Vancouver Island, reported on Tuesday that poisoning appeared to be the cause of death of 57-year-old Marcia Bergeron, who died on December 27th, 2006.

The coroner has linked the death to pills Bergeron purchased from a purported Canadian internet pharmacy about a month before she died. Toxicology tests revealed the counterfeit pills contained dangerously high levels of the heavy metals strontium, uranium and lead, the coroner said.

“The circumstances of Ms. Bergeron’s death are disturbing to Canadian pharmacists and patients, and an inquest is necessary to make public all the facts in this case,” said CPhA Executive Director Jeff Poston. “This case reinforces our message that Canadians should buy their drugs from their community pharmacist, not from unknown internet sites.”

Bergeron was a U.S. citizen who spent part of the year on Quadra Island in Vancouver, Canada.

Coroner Stanton said most purported Canadian internet pharmacies marketed to bargain-seeking U.S. patients and pretend to be Canadian when in fact they are located overseas. The sites also change web addresses frequently, making them difficult to trace, she said. “They all claim a Canadian legitimacy,” she said. “But if you start looking deeper, you find that neither the company names or affiliations they mention are actually legitimate.”

In August of 2005, the FDA conducted an operation at New York, Miami, and Los Angeles airports and found that nearly half of the imported drugs intercepted from four selected countries were shipped to fill orders that consumers believed they were placing with “Canadian pharmacies.” Of the drugs being promoted as “Canadian,” based on accompanying documentation, 85 percent actually came from 27 other countries around the globe. A number of these products also were found to be counterfeit. These results demonstrated that some internet sites that claimed to be “Canadian” were, in fact, selling drugs of dubious origin, safety and efficacy.

A report by the World Health Organization’s International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Task Force in November 2006 concluded that medicines purchased over the internet from sites that conceal their actual physical address are counterfeit or substandard in over 50% of cases.

This is a very important lesson for people who order drugs off the internet.  While some of these drugs are indeed legitimate, in many other cases they are either fakes with no active ingredients, or they contain harmful substances that can cause severe damage or even death, as in the case of Marcia Bergeron.

Consumers need to ask themselves if saving a few dollars is worth risking their health and possibly their lives.

For more info on how to avoid counterfeit drugs visit: http://www.buysafedrugs.info/