Rubio bill targets illicit drug sales online
Amid a soaring rise in overdose deaths, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio introduced a bipartisan bill Wednesday aimed at blocking online sales of illicit drugs, including highly lethal fentanyl.
Called the “Domain Reform for Unlawful Drug Sellers Act,” the bill would freeze and then block websites found to illegally facilitate online drug sales in the United States. Rubio, a Republican, is co-sponsoring the bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
“Florida ranks second in the nation for overdose deaths, and far too many families across the country find themselves torn apart by drug addiction,” Rubio said. “We need to crack down on bad actors, including those from China, that target our youth and families with the online sales of counterfeit and illicit drugs like fentanyl.”
Without action, Rubio said, fentanyl will continue to fuel the growing opioid crisis — already largely blamed for many of the nation’s 100,000 overdose deaths during the pandemic. That number, which covered April 2020 to April 2021, was a record increase of 28.5% over the previous year.
In Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties alone, more than 50 people a month die from drug overdoses, a recent report found, the vast majority of them due to fentanyl or fentanyl mixed with other illicit drugs or alcohol.
“We have to stop the flow of these drugs one way or another,” said Andrae Bailey, founder of Orlando-based Project Opioid, a campaign to address the issue. “The opioid crisis has really become a fentanyl crisis. These drugs are pouring in, and not just over the border. They’re coming through the mail from overseas.”
Unlike heroin, which requires the cultivation of opium poppy plants, fentanyl is created in a lab. Much of the U.S. supply of the drug comes from China, where drug dealers sell either the drug itself, structurally equivalent forms or the precursor ingredients, typically online.
“Fentanyl is unlike any other drug problem in modern history. It’s more useful to think of it as a mass poisoning than as a traditional drug epidemic,” noted a 2020 report from the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank. “Fentanyl is a mail-order product, marketed on the open internet and shipped directly to consumers and dealers, no international drug cartels required. Some of it comes across the border from Mexico, but much of it comes from poorly regulated labs in China. They often guarantee delivery, so sure are they that their small packages will slip by in cargo shipments or standard mail.”
In 2018, the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations determined a simple Google search allowed buyers to connect with suppliers. It was able to identify more than 500 sales, totaling $230,000, involving six online sellers. The greatest number of purchases came from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Rubio’s bill builds on the success of a federal Food and Drug Administration pilot program earlier this year in which the agency engaged directly with website registries to place a hold on domain names tied to illicit drug activity.
Essentially, the move freezes the domain name in place so it can’t be updated, transferred or deleted during a weeklong review period. If the domain is then suspended, it would be unavailable to the public.
Tech experts say the move will likely slow the illicit activity — but not stop it altogether.
“This is a huge problem, in part because these are internet sites that are based abroad,” said Carlos Carbonell, founder and CEO of the Orlando-based tech company Echo Interaction Group. “I think the bill is a really good step, but this is big business, so the drug providers will work hard to find another way.”
The legislation includes an appeals process to allow legitimate online pharmacies that are mistakenly identified to demonstrate they’re operating legally.
A 2015 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University estimated that revenue from online illicit drug sales was at least $150 million that year. It is widely believed to be considerably larger now.