...wants systems place by 2007, and testing is beginning now. The leading tracking technology at this time is RFID (radio frequency identification). Among the first drugs to try this system are Viagra (Pfizer), Oxycontin (Purdue Pharma), and one HIV drug, Trizivir (Glaxo). For obvious reasons expensive drugs (or those with street value) are most likely to be faked.

Drug Counterfeiting

Several years ago AIDS Treatment News published warnings from the FDA that fraudulent, counterfeit drugs had entered the mainstream U.S. supply. These were sold to patients at full price in standard pharmacies or hospitals (not through unconventional channels like unregulated Web sites). Sometimes the fake drugs had no active ingredient; sometimes cheap drug in the same class was substituted for an expensive one; sometimes the fake contained the right drug but in a much lower dose; and sometimes the drugs were real, but had been stolen and re-sold. Doctors or patients could be shown how to detect tiny anomalies in the printing on some packages or on the labels of bottles, but other times the fakes were so good that even experts could not identify them without chemical testing. Some of the fake or illegal drugs were not kept at proper temperatures and could have deteriorated chemically--sometimes baking in trunks of cars in the sun while deals were made in parking lots. No one knows how big the problem is, because many fakes are never detected; if a patient does not respond, that is attributed to the illness or other factors, and no one knows that the patient never received the treatment they thought they were taking.

How could this happen to mainstream medicines that are sold by leading U.S. pharmacies and hospitals? The consensus is that bad drugs enter the supply through the "secondary market" in pharmaceutical distribution--a system that is mostly legitimate, but has been open to abuse.

U.S. pharmaceutical companies seldom sell their drugs directly to pharmacies or hospitals--for various reasons, probably mainly because the profit margins for distributors are vastly less than for selling patented medicines. Instead they sell mainly to a few large distributors. In addition there is the secondary market of thousands of small distributors, who make tiny profits by looking for deals where they can buy a batch of drugs and sell it for a little...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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