[governance] Global trade in medicines - we have a new regulator

[Barry Shein]

From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net>
>One undeniable fact, unfortunately, is that the number of scam artists enga=
>ged in selling ,education online, often without proper prescriptions, is fa=
>r higher than the number of legitimate online medicine stores.   You might =
>think back to the amount of spam you receive that advertises virility pills=
>, or even controlled drugs such as steroids and narcotics.

I believe we need to move beyond this old notion that the problem with
spam in particular is limited to the unscrupulous.

Certainly the unscrupulous are an easy target, who would defend
sinners?

But we have created this notion that if someone is of the acceptable
(business) class then other than some superficial and almost never
enforced notion that they must have a business relationship with you
they can send email etc without limit or (effectively) cost.

Meanwhile email has become almost as useless as a medium due to
so-called "legitimate" email as unscrupulous.

I have scripts which delete almost everything commercial unless I have
some very specific expectation of a useful message, such as an open
business order.

I have to, I get one to two thousand messages a day.

I'm sure I'm not unique in this regard.

The current conventions (they're mostly conventions) say, for example,
that if I have my car insured with BigCo insurance then every one of
their 100,000 worldwide agents has legitimate access to my mail box to
pitch life insurance, financial instruments, etc, anything really, if
they sold toothpaste they could pitch toothpaste.

The only practical limit seems to be that each company individually
tries to figure out how much would so annoying that I might ignore
them entirely.

Which is of limited comfort when there are thousands and thousands of
"legitimate" companies.

I may be a little ahead of the curve on this but I see this rising
tide of corporations discovering exactly what motivated the
"unscrupulous": They can send literally a billion messages per day for
almost no incremental cost.

It's a big, complex subject but I think we will soon be due for a sea
change in thinking regarding this entire topic.

Merely focusing on the "unscrupulous" will be insufficient as
end-users try to sort through thousands of completely uncoordinated
and seemingly unlimited emails from the "scrupulous".

What drives spammers is the free advertising.

But that might drive anyone. And, as we see, it does.


-- 
        -Barry Shein

The World              | bzs at TheWorld.com           | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD        | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
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