Drug counterfeiters make their money by selling the real drugs or the bogus ones. How that actually happens sounds more like a novel or TV movie, and less like something that could be so frighteningly real.
From organized crime to street hoodlums, there are thousands of Americans making big money selling counterfeit drugs.
- The drugs may be stolen or purchased for little money to begin with, adulterated or diluted, then resold through a series of warehouses and distributors for much less than the drug cost from the manufacturer, but very profitably for the crook who is selling them. The distributor and pharmacy can then buy them less expensively, too, meaning they'll profit more than they would have if the drugs had been purchased from a clean and legal source.
- The drug may be manufactured using non-pharma ingredients, like sugar pills or even just colored water, then sold into the legal system with plenty of profit built in.
Eventually, whether directly from the crooks, or from bona fide warehouses which have obtained drugs from illegal sources, those counterfeit or adulterated drugs find their way to the friendly pharmacist, and then to unsuspecting patients.
How those pharmacies end up with bogus drugs is explained by following the trail from manufacturing through the warehousing and distribution system -- even though that is, literally, impossible to do. Some states allow a legal drug distribution company to be created by little more than the filling out of an application and payment of a small fee.
In her book, Dangerous Doses, Katherine Eban describes the system created in Florida that allowed for registration of thousands of shell companies that easily covered up the trail, therefore effectively creating an easy way for bogus drugs to become highly profitable as they made their way into the legal American drug supply.
Until the FDA implements a "pedigree" system, one that will follow and define the trail of each drug from manufacturing to distribution by a pharmacist to a patient, counterfeiters will continue to make huge profits and patients will be harmed.
