Counterfeit pharmaceuticals are bad for both the manufacturer and the consumer. The drug maker loses revenue for every bottle of counterfeit medication that is sold; the total for the industry lost to counterfeiting is roughly $30 billion a year – and it’s going up. The customer is ripped off because he or she paid for a prescription drug and instead got water or aspirin – or something much worse.
One answer to the counterfeit question is technology, particularly radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that can track drug shipments from the maker to the pharmacy.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, sent out its first bottles of the painkiller with RFID tags attached. Pfizer, which makes Viagra, one of the most widely counterfeited prescription medications, says it will be shipping its impotence drug with RFID tags by the end of next year. The Food and Drug Administration wants RFID tags used extensively across the pharmaceutical industry by 2007.
It may be the only way to stem the explosion of counterfeit drugs. And with some Americans (surveys show about 4 percent of the population) going online to buy drugs from Canada, Europe or who know where, the country needs a way to effectively track their flow,
The FDA has yet to require the RFID tags, nor should it. For the reason mentioned above, most drug makers will be happy to employ the technology.
Not every drug needs to be tagged, however. Some drugs are simply not candidates for counterfeiting – at least until the technology is widespread and cheap. Determining which drugs to tag should be left up to the manufacturers or distributors. Only they can decide if the costs of doing so are outweighed by the benefits.
But as counterfeits grow and the cost of the new technology goes down, the day when most drugs, even over-the-counter drugs, are tracked is probably not far off.