I've had severe asthma since I was a small child. It's hospitalized me a couple of times. I'm fairly healthy now, but I still try to keep a rescue inhaler within 20 minutes' reach all the time, because something might still trigger an asthma attack and it can get deadly really fast.
Those stupid inhalers have only gotten more expensive and more difficult to get over the years. Sans insurance, a few years ago I used OTC Primatine, which wasn't great, but mostly did the job. Then those were all banned in the U.S. because of the accelerant they used and nothing showed up to take their place. (Oh, except for homeopathic rescue inhalers, now sold on shelves at major drugstores throughout the U.S. -- so just to bruise this dead horse a little bit more, in the U.S. real emergency medication for a common medical condition is hard to get, but magic water for the same thing is available everywhere.)
After paying a visit to a doctor and going through the whole 20 minute interview and all that nonsense, I can be given a prescription for a $70 inhaler.
Or, knowing exactly what I need, I could order it from a Canadian pharmacy where the cost of exactly the same inhaler is less than the cost of shipping.
$70 and a doctor's visit isn't a big deal for me anymore. But a few years ago it was, and it still is for an awful lot of people.
Asthamtic here; I feel ya. However, I can also walk into a pharmacy here (Ireland) and explain to them that I'm an asthmatic, and need a releiver inhaler. They will give an "emergency" inhaler, (same inhaler, no questions asked) over the counter and ask me nicely to go to the doctor for the next one.
You're probably an edge case. The vast majority of people who are ordering from online pharmacies are doing so because they think they know what they're doing, and because they feel X or Y, they should take Z. This isn't really a problem with inhalers per se, because the amount of them you are required to ingest is actually pretty damn high before you are in any danger, but for stuff like prescription painkillers, people are self medicating and avoiding doctors visits for issues that they should be seeing a professional for.
I tried the pharmacy counter approach once at several pharmacies, they wouldn't do anything without a prescription from a doctor. In the U.S., asthma inhalers are used by a few silly teenagers to get "high" (for those without asthma: effective rescue inhalers are corticosteroids that as a side effect also accelerate your heart rate). The reaction in the U.S. of course has been to make the rescue inhalers difficult to get for the ~25 million people in the country with the condition.
I would want to see some estimates on how many people are actually abusing online pharmacies to harm themselves or others vs. people using them legitimately to get medication that's otherwise unavailable or too expensive locally. I know at least a couple of women that use them for birth control, because there's a product available that way that isn't available in the U.S., that has less of a hormonal impact than the usual stuff. (I don't know the name of the product or anything else about it, though.)
As far as abuse goes, I suspect that abuse of ADHD drugs might be somewhat common, and I'd bet there are at least a few on HN doing that (because it's been discussed before), and honestly I find it difficult to care at all about that kind of abuse.
I don't think that further removing access to affordable medication is the right way to get people to see a doctor.
I've had severe asthma since I was a small child. It's hospitalized me a couple of times. I'm fairly healthy now, but I still try to keep a rescue inhaler within 20 minutes' reach all the time, because something might still trigger an asthma attack and it can get deadly really fast.
Those stupid inhalers have only gotten more expensive and more difficult to get over the years. Sans insurance, a few years ago I used OTC Primatine, which wasn't great, but mostly did the job. Then those were all banned in the U.S. because of the accelerant they used and nothing showed up to take their place. (Oh, except for homeopathic rescue inhalers, now sold on shelves at major drugstores throughout the U.S. -- so just to bruise this dead horse a little bit more, in the U.S. real emergency medication for a common medical condition is hard to get, but magic water for the same thing is available everywhere.)
After paying a visit to a doctor and going through the whole 20 minute interview and all that nonsense, I can be given a prescription for a $70 inhaler.
Or, knowing exactly what I need, I could order it from a Canadian pharmacy where the cost of exactly the same inhaler is less than the cost of shipping.
$70 and a doctor's visit isn't a big deal for me anymore. But a few years ago it was, and it still is for an awful lot of people.