The dot-pharmacy URL is one step closer to becoming what the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy would consider a domain with integrity. The association announced Tuesday that it has entered negotiations with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—which oversees domain suffixes like .com, .tv, and .edu among others—to take charge of the .pharmacy suffix.
The association says the negotiations would put it on the hook for verifying that companies with .pharmacy are ones which comply with pharmacy laws and practice standards. The association said in a statement that it has been monitoring use of this suffix for some time and has reviewed over 10,650 “Internet drug outlets and found 97% of them to be out of compliance.”
The initiative is supported by bold-face companies including Eli Lilly, Gilead and Merck, as well as the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies and INTERPOL, among others.
