Can Technology Counter Counterfeit Drugs?

They arrested a pharmacist here and tried to charge him with sales of fake drugs. It turned out that their case fell apart as he had sourced the genuine drug, made by the same company, in India for about 10% of his wholesale cost. The company knew that he was doing this and they tried to throw the red herring of fake drugs and hope the Canadian authorities would do their work for them. They partly succeeded. They were able to get his source from batch numbers and stopped them from shipping the product.

All that said, I know in Africa faked drugs with zero active ingredients are a proble, also in Asia.

some sort of RFID would work, as they are under 5 cents and can be in the pill and pass through. They would work only in the pill so the pills could be read and each pill could have an ID. They can be made to self destroy in stomach acid, if desired, or just pass through.

Nanotech RFIDs...it might work, but if cheap enough to not drive the price through the roof, then probably would also be cheap to counterfeit. Oooops! No net gain. How about certain and extreme punishments for those apprehended, with a strong committment to catching them?

In order to confuse people many unwanted ingredients are already added in the drugs. Adding more will only make it worst. Chemical degrade in time so do not retain same signature in time.

Worst may come to ask the drug manufacture to disclose all ingredients properly and to prove that only useful ingredients are placed in. Subjecting person to what one does not want may become crime.

If drug cost is kept reasonably low, just above production level then any interest in counterfeit will come down. Testing of drug for chemical signature is not an impossible thing. However, testing all samples around the world is not practical.

People buy drugs from Internet and street vendors so that is a big problem. Good retail drug seller will be scared a bit to get trapped and lose business.

I am planning to develop IMS and Spectroscopy based instruments to detect bad drugs. If you are interested then join our developmental process.

"I am planning to develop IMS and Spectroscopy based instruments to detect bad drugs. If you are interested then join our developmental process."

An optical comb (pulsed laser) may be the way to go for this. Check it out.

There would be much less of a problem if the big drug companies sold at a more realistic price...they are ripping off the NHS in UK....

Del

Most do here, too, but Wal-Mart (and because of them several others) are selling many hundreds of the most-used prescription drugs at $2US per refill. That's what, less than £/€1? I'm not up on current currency conversions, but two bucks a pop for any medicine is not so bad. Sure, the less-common drugs for more rare conditions are more expensive, but many people are benefitting from this.

"I, for one, am now asking my pharmacist "how do I know it's the 'real stuff' and not a cheap knock off??"

Provenance (n. Place of origin; derivation. The history of the ownership of an object, especially when documented or authenticated.)
This is important when it comes to antiques, art, wine, first editions, gemstones, all kinds of fake-able goods. So why NOT for pharmaceuticals? The only way the consumer has of self-protecting from this (at least before the fact, maybe you can tell you were ripped off due to death or limpness) is through the pharmacy. A good provenance would go a long way toward making that possible. True, even the documentation could be faked, but it would make it more difficult to deceive the pharmacist and thus the consumer.

OBTW, I gave your post a vote for being on-topic, it didn't strike me as being at all off.

The system for testing and approving drugs is very costly, some say unnecessarily so, but it did prevent most thalidomide induced birth defects in the USA, thus the drug companies have to recover their cost, why not where the approval costs are highest and caused the problem?

That said, many drugs are very cheap to make and once approved can be very profitable, with the tabletting, packaging and other costs being a lot higher than the cost of the active ingredient. That means they can make extra $$ by selling in developing countries if they can limit onward travel to the USA.

As for RFID, there are enough data bits in a 3 cent RFID chip to give a unique number to many trillions of pills, so RFID is workable, however even 3 cents is a lot in poor countries and the people do not have the infrastructure to have every pharmacy equipped with an RFID reader/pill counter. Most fake pills are sold by locals who claim they have stolen them from a real pharmacy to explain the lost cost. Some fake pills contain a trace of active ingredient to fool any qualitative test run on them.

At the root of it is the way the colonial conquerors and the dictators who succeded them keep the people uneducated and steal all their money. True, some were better than others. The UK got better after they lost the USA, and so we see many ex UK colonies with better schools/infratsructure than those of other European powers. Still the African genes tend to make them susceptable to the "chief effect", where they grant power to dictators because this mimics the way their tribal politics had evolved over millennia. We have seen this in many of these countries who were left with democracies upon independance and now have dictatorships that try to masquerade as deomcracies. Even some European countries fell prey to this, (Germany, Spain, Italy) so it is part of the risk of democracy that it can become a dictatorship, but there is no way for it to exit dictatorship quietly.

ANyway, this goes off topic, but uneducated people are easier prey to fake meds.

So true - most of the world's peoples' problems could be solved by better education.

The RFID component would have to go through all the FDA and health testing, as any other component. This is very expensive and will ultimately be borne by the patient. The cost will still be there.Size will also be an issue.

Colonialism aside (topic for another day, and definitely off-topic), the counterfeiters make money from people that can afford to pay, not from others. The focus must stay on track for detection, prevention, etc. much more so than any political agenda. The money is made on a mega scale, not one pill here and there...the whole distribution channel is involved either by acts of omission (accidental or mistaken) or co-mission (intentional acts).

Can technology counter the fakes? Yes, absolutely. But infra-structure for data collection must be in place and "strength of will" to prosecute must be in place. Knowledge of the entire distribution channel must be in place...One view is that next to global warming, fake pharmaceuticals present an apolitical, international threat to all peoples' well-being.

The 'e-pedigree' programs coming into being (check out California)may well the first real beginning of an approach to stop this alarming practice.

Incidentally, a recent study revealee that 85% of all drugs sold on teh Internet are fake. I am assuming that 'educated people' are Internet users?! The point is that we are ALL at risk...

once a single company gets an RFID chip approved, it can then be used everywhere. They are glass enclosed and small enough for the smallest pills to hold one.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=939

They can be used for individual pills, or just bulk identifiers.

As for 'they only prey on those that can afford them':-

The fakes prey on the poorest and most desperate who divert $$ from food etc to try for a cure.

As for mega sales, the money is made in a distribution system that collects from all markets and streams it to the maker. At the root are prescriptions for pills a week/month at a time, with feeding all the way up the chain.

As for pedigree, counterfeiters are adept at copying pedigrees, RFID would be a good method to give assurance at many levels, but it can be cheated by a fake RFID reader that gives a green light. Sophisticated buyers will have their own test pills to verify the readers, to avoid faked RFID readers.

Beware of sweeping generalizations and superficial analyses.

Short of detailed exploration of all the branches I must be brief and non specific

I understand..but at the risk of inaccuracy and incomplete information.

When dealing with a situation about which he had very limited knowledge, Mark Twain was quoted as saying, "it is better to say nothing and let people assume that you may be foolish, than to speak and remove all doubt..."

FYI

I contacted the manufacturer of nano-RFID chips. There is a major technical barrier which will not allow RFID (as we know it today) to work at the nano level...but a great idea nonetheless..for tomorrow.

Or, as you (almost) stated previously, beware of low-flying panaceas.

Yes..absolutely. Generating ideas/brainstorming is invaluable..but, raising expectations about "easy answers" can be very harmful..confusing at best.

Another big challenge going to be of good RF-ID in useless or bad drug. Bad drug can be produced by same manufacturer who otherwise manufactures good drug (quality problem going un-noticed and being sold with good drug tag). Unless disaster takes place, such drugs hardly get detected. Medicine not being effective is common.

in poor countries, cost can be a problem, both for the tags and the reader.

In the USA for many drugs the cost is tolerable and the inert tag can be identified and even made to be destroyed in the gut to avoid tracking via dung, although that would be good for wildlife studies if you used tags that would endure.

anything valuable can be faked and often the user lacks the smarts to determine the validity of the drugs.

The only cure is a far higher degree of control, and concommitant costs, than are practical in these developing countries.

"...The only cure is a far higher degree of control..."

Well, that and some good old-fashioned honest ethics... Me, I'd vote for a far higher level of conscience.

Ethics are $3/dozen in these undeveloped countries.

Well, I didn't say it'd be cheap, now did I? Or easy, for that matter! Just wishful thinking, old chum...

If cost of the medicine is taken up as burden by a nation then all rich and poor can get the power of medicine in their life. Making the medicine un-affordable obviously tells how badly a nation is managed.

In India still we have lots of people who give medicine almost free and large number of people are treated in this way. I wonder why cruel money culture is brought into essential item like medicine. It is like taxing a sick person who have little capacity to live like a normal person. I think it is a cruel concept by in-human natured machines that look like humans but are worst than dragons trying to rule the world using all in-human means to reach their goal.

Why otherwise vaccines are distributed free of cost to millions in India? It is realization by India Government as their duty. I hope others also can understand it.

If you do not understand what I say then I do not understand what you say.

I should have posted this months ago..my apologies. There is a MUST READ book called "Dangerous Doses" which gets into specifics regarding counterfeit drugs and medications..It is available through Amazon, or others, I believe. FYI