The History of Drugs.com Is the History of the Internet

It's probably no surprise that a URL called drugs.com has been passed around so much. It's prime internet real estate, something that is bound to be stumbled across by senior citizens and stoned high school seniors alike. When we decided to start exploring who's behind the internet's best addresses, drugs.com was an easy, unanimous choice to look at first.

Today, drugs.com is a resource where you can look up information on prescription drugs, and find news from the FDA and the latest medical studies, but this is only the domain's latest and most helpful iteration of a site dating all the way back to 1998. In a way, the history of drugs.com since then is the history of the internet, in a single, could-be-notorious-but-never-is, web address.

It starts back in the wild and innocent days before the dot-com crash. Those were crazy times, the 90s. Everyone was using dial-up connections to go to AOL chat rooms. The words "Silicon Valley" conjured up images of guys with ponytails riding recumbent bicycles to their jobs where they sat on beanbag chairs to program. The Tennessee Titans were somehow in the Super Bowl, losing to the St. Louis Rams (!) in th​e most dramatic fashion possible, yet all anyone could talk about after the game was that commercial with a monkey, one of several Super Bowl commercials that a website paid for in order to use the time to brag about how much money they had just wasted.

So you can probably forgive the 21-year-old Northern Arizona University drop-out Eric MacIver for seeming a little disappointed that he was only able to sell drugs.com for a reported $823,456 in 1999. "We were hoping for over a million, but we were more or less expecting between $750,000 and a million," he told​ Wired.

MacIver, who Wired noted had just celebrated turning 21 "with a limousine-driven night on the town," paid for the domain with the ostensible intention of turning it into "a start-up pharmaceutical distribution Web site," but was apparently discouraged when he found out that the sale of pharmaceuticals is regulated pretty heavily. The 90s, right?

Drugs.com was then sold to an investment group called Venture Frogs, which also never developed the site into anything other than a portal for "sending its traffic through the GoTo.com search e​ngine," because the Venture Frog team opted instead to devote its attention to the fledgling Zappos.com.

Man, remember Zappos? Wow. The early 2000s.

Anyway, post-Zappos, Drugs.com found its way into the gentle hands of The Drugsite Trust, which was founded by a "pair of New Zealand pharmacists" who did not respond to a press inquiry.

The goal of being the biggest pill pusher on the internet was finally abandoned. As it took over in 2002, the ​Trust stated that it was "dedicated to providing free, unbiased information on over the counter (OTC) and prescription medicines. Drugs.com provides the most comprehensive, easy to read professional and consumer drug information that is currently available on the Internet."

While it's a unified and good enough looking site, its informa​tion is pulled from reputable drug databases, including Harvard Health Publications and Stedman's Medical Dictionary. It got further credibility from a partne​rship with the FDA that was announced in 2010.

I came across the site when it surfaced as th​e main source used by an "expert witness" by the state of Oklahoma, in order to justify its use of midazolam as an anesthetic in a lethal-injection cocktail. While it's a fine resource, drugs.com isn't set up to be the only source for an expert testimony before a federal court.

Since 1998, drugs.com has journeyed from the speculative land-rush days of the dot-com boom, through the rise of serious internet commerce, all the way to being irresponsibly granted far too much authority. Of course, with a name like "drugs.com," it was destined for success all the way back in the 90s. Pets.com may have been a flash in the pan, but drugs are here to stay.

​Masters of their Domain is a column that investigates who owns popular or interesting domain names, and what they're doing with them.