Can you answer YES to any of these questions?
- Does your doctor prescribe a drug for you that addresses an ongoing medical problem (like high blood pressure, cholesterol or GERD)?
- Does your doctor prescribe, or do you receive as an injectable or infused drug for a specialized disease such as cancer, Parkinson's disease or any other drug that is very expensive (even if it is your insurance or Medicare that pays for it)?
- Does your doctor prescribe any expensive drug for you in any form of tablet, caplet, gelcap?
- Do you take any lifestyle drugs, like Viagra, or sleep drugs like Ambien?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions (or if a friend or loved one might answer yes) then you may have already been a victim of counterfeit drugs, or you may be victimized in the future.
The only good news is that there is a growing awareness of this problem. Everything else is not just bad news, it's absolutely frightening.
Most of us think the term "counterfeit drug" must describe drugs that are being manufactured and ordered from outside the country where the US can't guarantee their purity. In fact, that describes only some counterfeits. This article describes the counterfeiting that is a thriving business inside our borders, often with drugs that are manufactured by American pharmaceutical companies, and may have already sickened hundreds of thousands of Americans.
You may be one of the people who has been affected and not even know about it. For example:
- If you take Lipitor, you may be one of 600,000 people who received bogus Lipitor in 2003.
- Have you been treated for cancer? Then you may be one of 25,000 people who in 2002 and 2003 were infused with a counterfeit blood boosting drug, either Procrit or Epogen.
The bottom line? None of us are safe or immune to the potential problems that could result from one of the very aspects of health care we have trusted the most: filling prescriptions and taking our medicine.
This problem is not the same as the drug errors we hear about where somewhere in the prescribing, dispensing and taking, we get the wrong drug or the wrong dose. Those problems are a separate issue, albeit just as problematic to the patient.
What Makes a Drug a Counterfeit?
Many counterfeit drugs, also called adulterated drugs, begin as some portion of a real drug. A supply of the drug may be stolen from one source in a network of warehousers and distributors located across the country. The drug is then intentionally altered to make it more profitable to those who stole it. According to Katherine Eban, author of Dangerous Doses, the drugs are diluted, altered or relabeled, then sold back into the distribution system where, eventually, they end up at your local pharmacy, or perhaps even at the hospital or other facility where you may be treated.
In addition to stolen drugs, some drugs are purchased from patients who get them for free. In Eban's book, she describes this scenario: a Medicaid patient exits from a clinic with the drugs that have just been prescribed, and dispensed for free. Once outside, the patient is approached by a shill who offers cash for that expensive drug, at a fraction of its real value.
The shill collects enough of each drug over a period of time, cleans all the labeling off it, relabels it as a higher (and more expensive) dose, or simply a new, unidentifiable lot number, and then sells it to the first of a chain of bogus wholesalers and distributors. Unless someone catches it along the way, it will eventually make its way to a pharmacy, then a patient.
In 2003, the FDA outlined a number of additional ways counterfeiting takes place.
READ MORE:
- Counterfeit Drugs: From Organized Crime to Neighborhood Pharmacies
- How Do Drug Counterfeiters Make Their Money?
- How Do Counterfeit Drugs Make Their Way Into the Legal Drug Supply?
- What is Being Done to Stop Counterfeit Drugs?
- How Can Patients Protect Themselves From Counterfeit Drugs?
