UK Pharmacist Nearly Gets Prison For Selling Viagra

Written by Richard Simmons| Monday, 06 December 2010| There are 2 comments

The Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency recently claimed another success after a long campaign to shut down a website selling Viagra in the UK. The website which was operated by Mr. William Parsons from Manchester sold Viagra illegally using blank prescriptions that he had got from a doctor in Cyprus and then prescribed the drugs to himself.

Despite being warned by the MHRA that what he was doing was completely illegal he continued selling the Viagra and has now received a suspended nine-month jail term and 150 hours of community service from Londons Southwark Crown Court.  The judge said that he only avoided going to jail immediately because of the fact that he was the sole carer for his sick wife.

This case is unusual because normally illegal pharmaceutical web sites don't bother with selling the real Viagra drug but instead buy fakes from China or India. In this case Mr. William Parsons was not convicted of selling an illegal medication but merely convicted of selling a legal medication illegally.

When Viagra is purchased online a prescription must always be issued by a proper licenced doctor and the mistake Mr. Parsons made was to forge prescriptions and issue them to himself. In fact when one considers the whole set up it was a pretty amateur criminal operation and not nearly as sophisticated as many other websites which work by taking large amounts of money off credit cards, sending dangerous or completely dud fake Viagra tablets and giving false information about the side effects and contraindications of Viagra.

It is possible to check that the medication you are receiving comes from a legal, UK based licenced pharmacy using the Pharmacheck system. With Pharmacheck you can get the actual postal address of the UK dispensing pharmacy so that you have complete peace of mind that what you are ordering has not come from a filthy factory in Asia and that it won't give you a heart attack.

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