New plans to crack down on counterfeit and fake medicines have been announced in Europe.
Laws agreed yesterday by the European Parliament will require all prescription medicines to have a unique code – enabling them to be traced from production to distribution.
They will also have to be packaged so that efforts to break in will be "evident".
Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, a member of the European Parliament who oversaw the new legislation, admitted it might make little difference to internet pharmacies.
She said it would however create a "safe" environment for patients so they could trust their medication 100 per cent if it complied with the new rules.
She added: "For sure, internet pharmacist and internet sale is a whole black box which is responsible for a huge amount of the falsified medicines we have on the market.
"Therefore we have to try to regulate the internet. But we all know how difficult that is."
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