New rules set forth by Google in the past days will tighten up regulations for advertising drugs online. The new regulations set in place by Google will limit advertisers to placing ads online only in their respective countries.

This means that Canadian pharmacies will only be allowed to show their ads in Canada, American pharmacies in the United States, and so on and so forth.

According to an article from Barron’s, this could have a pretty big impact.

That sounds both logical and esoteric, but it has ramifications for ad revenue. Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint.Amtech, notes today that a test search of each of the top 10 best-selling subscription drugs on Google found that 68% of the ads on the first page of search results were from Canadian online pharmacies that would be disallowed under the new rules. For the top five drugs, 76% of the ads were for Canadian online pharmacies. (Try it; search for Lipitor, Nexium, or Plavix.)

Google says that the change will cause a slight drag in revenue, but I am sure that big pharma is more than making up for the difference somehow.

It’s no secret that legitimate Canadian pharmacies despise so-called “Canadian pharmacy” spam — those illegal missives you receive in your inbox promising you can buy drugs like Viagra with no prescription.

The reality is that these so-called Canadian pharmacies aren’t Canadian at all (and in many cases aren’t pharmacies at all). They are criminal operations based in places like Russia or various Third World countries. They are scam artists — and they give legal, licensed Canadian pharmacies a bad name.

Fortunately, these spammers are increasingly being forced to use words other than “Canadian pharmacy” in their e-mails. The reason is simple: people are wising up to the scam.

According to BitDefender, which offers weekly reports on e-mail spam trends:

It seems like medicine spammers took a more discrete approach this week, advertising their products without using the keywords “Canadian Pharmacy.” The Canadian Pharmacy spammers take various approaches such as using various mail subjects to make the message look as if they had been sent by friends to make users open the messages.

The words appearing most in spam e-mails, according to BitDefender, include “click,” “email,” “news,” “please,” and “privacy.”

Every week, BitDefender analyzes about seven million spam messages collected through a worldwide network of “honey pots.” A honey pot is an e-mail address that is only used to collect spam. The large number of analyzed messages and the global distribution of honey pots ensure reliable results, the company says.

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) last week released a report on online pharmacies that contained some startling claims.

Among other things, the NABP attempts to link Canadian online pharmacies to terrorism:

…purchasing medications from unknown and illegal sources via the Internet and other means is compromising the US medication distribution system and making US citizens vulnerable to bioterrorism attacks.

I guess it’s possible this is a valid threat — but frankly, it seems more like a scare tactic tied to a hot-button issue.

The NABP is widely quoted in the media on questions pertaining to Canadian pharmacies. Unfortunately, the NABP’s pattern has been to overhype the dangers of online pharmacies and to link unsafe, unlicensed foreign pharmacies with legitimate pharmacies that are licensed and in good standing with the Canadian government.

The NABP wants you to think that law-abiding, decent Canadian pharmacies are just as bad as the Russian crime syndicates that spam your inbox with misspelled solitications for Viagra. This is flat-out wrong.

The NABP’s “educational” efforts on online pharmacies have been subsidized, in no small part, by Big Pharma. Big Pharma loses money when consumers buy their medications from Canadian pharmacies. So the organization tends to take an extreme stance, overstating its case and confusing consumers.

In fact, the NABP report contains statements that appear to be simply inaccurate. For example, the press release touting the report states:

An alarming number of Internet drug outlets advertising on search engines flagrantly offer prescription medicine, including controlled substances, without a valid prescription… Many of these sites violate the recently adopted Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits the dispensing of controlled substance medications over the Internet without a valid prescription that has included a face-to-face physical examination.

I am curious which pharmacies and search engines the NABP is referring to, since Google is careful to only accept advertising from pharmacies that have been verified by PharmacyChecker.com. PharmacyChecker only approves pharmacies that meet stringent standards, including requiring an original doctor’s prescription based on an in-person consultation.

Certainly, if you do a Google search on Viagra or other medications that consumers commonly seek online, you will find the search results littered with online pharmacies — many of them fraudulent and claiming to be Canadian (when in most cases they aren’t). But this is not search engine advertising; these are organic search results, which Google has no control over.

Frankly, I think the evidence is clear that Google, with PharmacyChecker as its verification authority, has done a good job of separating legitimate pharmacies from fraudulent ones in its AdWords advertising.

So while you should certainly be cautious when buying drugs online, you shouldn’t believe every scary thing you read, either. For the truth about Canadian pharmacies, read this.