Canadian pharmacies are doling out prescriptions like never before. While they are serving a huge domestic market, they are also catering to customers in the US. These pharmacies operating out of Canada are filling out prescriptions for everything from common cold to controlling blood pressure.

It is understood that they can read prescriptions given out by Canadian doctors for Canadian patients but what about the patients across the border residing in the USA? In many cases, a Canadian doctor rewrites the prescription given out by his US counterpart so as to make the whole process of filing out process legal. In case of unlicensed pharmacies, no one bothers as, prescriptions are not needed just name the drug and they will ship it across to you. Negligence of some of the basic business ethics by certain firms has led to these pharmacies coming under the scanner of authorities both in the US and Canada.

In the US, fears have been raised over the risk to patients from sale of counterfeit drugs. These drugs may contain inert components, which can cause significant harm to the body of the consumer. In some cases it has been found legitimate drugs well past their expiry date were diverted to illegitimate retailers for sale across the internet. Cases of improperly manufactured drugs have also come to light.

According to the Canadian Medical Association, physicians should necessarily conduct a physical exam and discuss the merits and risks associated with consumption of a particular drug before it is prescribed. However, in case of many Canadian pharmacies this was not found to be the case. This was also facilitated by desperate patients in the United States who were willing to buy anything offered cheap for various ailments without being bothered about its side effects.

Some Canadian pharmacies have however, implemented many measures to gain trust of the customer based in US. Most notable among them is arranging for a visit by a Canada based physician to the patient in US for examining him before filling out a prescription. All this is happening while the business for Canadian firms is growing by leaps and bounds. Canadian firms are now filling out prescriptions like never before. Some firms have claimed to have filled as much as 3000 prescriptions a day indicating the volume of business catered to by these pharmacies.

So irrespective of the some of the measures being planned to regulate these pharmacies, it only seems that these firms will continue witness healthy growth rates.