A federal grand jury in California has indicted five men, including two doctors, on a variety of charges stemming from operation of an online pharmacy that in a nine-month period sold $33.6 million in prescription diet pills via the Internet.

The indictment charges that doctors who worked for Rx Medical One, a Los Angeles based company, approved more than 350,000 prescriptions from September 2003 to May 2004, most for diet drugs such as phentermine and Adipex and sleep aids such as Ambien.

The prescriptions were then filled by a pharmacy -- called Universal Pharmacy Solutions -- which was simply a warehouse in Pennsylvania that supplied the Internet site, according to the prosecutors. Federal agents raided the warehouse and shut down the operation in mid-2004.

Prosecutors said no doctor saw or examined patients before the drugs were shipped by the company. Customers filled out questionnaires that were reviewed by doctors who were paid $5 to $10 to approve each prescription, the indictment charges.

Prosecutors said on some occasions, a single doctor reviewed more than 1,000 questionnaires and issued prescriptions to be fulfilled by the company in a day.

U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan described the sale of diet pills in this manner as "high-tech drug-dealing."

"If you exclude meeting a dealer on a corner, the only difference between this and a street-level conspiracy was that the customers were asked to fill out a questionnaire," Meehan said. "It is still illegal and, without actual contact with a physician or pharmacist, very dangerous."

Patrick Egan, a lawyer for Universal Pharmacy Solutions, said the company was "reviewing the charges and will take appropriate action based on that review."