Pharmacist avoids jail for illegally advertising prescription-only Viagra

A Pharmacist from Manchester, who advertised Viagra illegally, has luckily avoided an immediate jail sentence.

Mr William Parsons advertised Viagra and other prescription medication used to treat male impotence on his website Potency.co.uk which has now been removed from the web.

Parsons, who also ran a pharmacy in the Peak District, was given a suspended nine-month jail term at London's Southwark Crown Court on Thursday after previously being convicted of three counts of advertising prescription-only medicine.

Passing sentence, Judge Peter Testar said: "This defendant has behaved in a way that he knows was illegal. That's the mischief of what he has done. He sought to defend the indefensible."

The court heard Parsons ran the website and the Hayfield Pharmacy in Derbyshire from 1999 until he sold the combined businesses and premises for just under £500,000 in 2007.

Parsons used blank prescriptions obtained from a doctor in Cyprus to prescribe the drugs himself to customers visiting the website. The site boasted "special offers" on the drugs. Kennedy Talbot, prosecuting, estimated Parsons made more than £1,000 a month from sales.

An inspector from regulatory body the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) visited the pharmacy in 2006 where the blank prescriptions were discovered. The inspector subsequently visited the website where he discovered the illegal offers.

Parsons was warned by the MHRA he would have to change his website in order to comply with the law, but the pharmacist refused.

Judge Testar said: "He carried on with the plainly illegal activity of advertising prescription only drugs. He simply decided he wasn't going to comply with the law. He thought if he carried on he wouldn't be stopped. These are regulations that are there for the protection of the public. The requirement of a prescription is there for a good reason."

The Judge said he had intended to pass an immediate custodial sentence but had decided not to as Parsons was the main provider of care for his sick wife. The nine-month sentence was suspended for two years. Parsons was also ordered to carry out 150 hours unpaid work in the community.

Pharmacist Accused of Stealing Viagra from Own Pharmacy

A pharmacist in USA Northern California has been arrested for apparently stealing Viagra and other male impotence treatments from his own pharmacy.

Timothy Rishwain is accused of taking $8,000 worth of erectile dysfunction medication from the Rite-Aid pharmacy where he worked. Store officials say they realized the numbers of the so-called "little blue pills" weren't adding up and hadn't for nearly 3 years. 

Detectives say it appears Rishwain was stealing the medications for personal use rather than making a profit.

Viagra and similar drugs cost as much as $20 per pill in America. Rishwain is facing charges of burglary, embezzlement and prescription fraud. 

Tesco to sell Viagra in store

Tesco have started a campaign to supply Viagra in-store to men over the age of 40 & up 65 years. Tesco last night confirmed that Viagra would be on sale from September 27 in 300 stores across the UK.

"They will have to complete a questionnaire and we will then carry out a blood pressure test, diabetes screen and cholesterol test."

This comes in line with Boots supplying Viagra in stores as well, so far we haven't heard any good reports about the service with the general public still too embarrassed to pop into their supermarket or local Boots to admit they have erectile dysfunction.

Not only that you have to be within a specific age range and go through a range of medical questions and physical tests before any Viagra is handed out.

Here at www.medical-specialists.co.uk we believe ordering is easy, fast & private with Viagra from as low as £37 per box and next day delivery from our in-house pharmacy and UK GMC registered Doctors who write all prescriptions.

We believe on-line is still the way forward for most men to buy embarrassing treatments such as male impotence medication.

Viagra scam on the rise

Numerous UK universities have been unknowingly helping criminals to sell fake Viagra over the internet.


A security firm has discovered that an increasing number of organisations using the .ac.uk domain are unknowingly pushing customers to websites offering fake erectile dysfunction pills.

Amichai Shulman, of the security company Imperva, which was responsible for uncovering the scam, emphasised how the criminals exploited software to piggyback on the computing resources of various colleges and universities. He also noted how the spammers exploited vulnerabilities in widely used technology called PHP.
The injected PHP codes included search terms such as Viagra and Cialis. Therefore, when a person searched for drugs such as these online, the universities and colleges’ web addresses would pop up in the top results. Anyone who clicked on these links would then be re-directed to a fake pharmacy selling counterfeit pills.

According to a BBC report, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in Kent was one school whose website became victim to the scam.
A spokesperson for the college said, “We immediately took action to temporarily close down and remove the compromised area while we resolved the issue.

Mr. Shulman of Imperva said that the rate such sites were being put up and taken down made it hard to get an exact figure of how many sites had been hit. However, he estimated that “thousands” of sites had been caught out by the drug spammers.