“Federal prosecutors have accused FedEx of knowingly shipping illegal drugs in interstate commerce and laundering money by merely doing its job: delivering packages (in this case, from online Internet pharmacies) to their intended recipients and getting paid for the service. …To avoid the very sort of ‘gotcha’ prosecution at issue here, Congress inserted exceptions for common carriers in each of the relevant statutes” authorizing shipment of prescription medications and controlled substances when done in the usual course of business.

While courts have generated no case law authoritatively interpreting these exemptions in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and the Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act (FDCA), “the need to do so had never presented itself because no prosecutor had ever dared to bring such a dubious indictment in the previous 45 years of the CSA’s existence.” [Cory Andrews, Washington Legal Foundation; earlier (“Feds indict FedEx for not snooping into packages”)]

Filed under: crime and punishment, pharmaceuticals