aul LeRoux launched his online prescription drug company in 2004. There were other black market pill peddlers, but LeRoux was the first to combine two American addictions—popping pills and online shopping.
He moved to Manila and set up his base of operations there because it offered cheap labor for his call centers, which took orders and pushed sales. As important, the Philippines' legal system was rife with corruption. He could buy silence. He registered a long list of Internet domains and set up a hand-crafted Black cloud of his own websites and multiple servers. A few sessions at his keyboard and he was a founder! In the New Economy, founders were rock stars. No factory, no staff, no board, no business plan—no problem.
In the tech age, all anyone needed to start a company was a good idea, and LeRoux had one.
Pills.
Little pastel bits of feel-good and chill were going to make him rich enough to curl up on a sofa made of currency. They were going to get him boats, cars, villas, airplanes, long-legged girls—freedom. Exactly how this stroke of genius came to him isn't clear, but genius it was. His timing was spot-on. He was perfectly positioned to ride the crest of a wave—a tsunami, really—that the established drug cartels didn't see coming. In the United States, the world's largest market for drugs, both legal and illegal, “dirty” street drugs peddled by the likes of Pablo Escobar and El Chapo were on their way out.
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