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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11409

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Hirschler B.
Bogus drug peddlers thrive in cyberspace
Reuters 2007 Sep 5
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=healthNews&storyID=2007-09-05T100846Z_01_L0368306_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDICINES-COUNTERFEIT.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2


Full text:

VIENNA (Reuters) – Harry Lime, peddling diluted penicillin in post-war Vienna in the 1949 film “The Third Man”, was an early pioneer: today the counterfeit medicine business has gone global, fuelled by the “perfect channel” of the Internet, according to a U.N drug watchdog.

In many countries, the abuse and trafficking of prescription drugs, including stimulants and painkillers, now equals or exceeds the use of illicitly manufactured heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and opioids, according to the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).

In the United States, it is second only to cannabis.

The massive demand for these drugs — together with lifestyle medicines such as Pfizer’s Viagra — has led to an explosion in counterfeits, sometimes with fatal results.

“The sophistication of the counterfeiters certainly has increased tremendously,” Gisela Wieser-Herbeck, a drug control officer at the INCB, told Reuters.

“It’s a market where you can make a lot of money.”

The human cost can be devastating. Victims include women in Argentina who died after taking a bogus anemia treatment, deaths in Cambodia due to fake malaria drugs, and children in Haiti and India killed by paracetemol made with antifreeze.

In many African countries and parts of Asia and Latin America more than 30 percent of medicines on sale may be counterfeit, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Most industrialized countries have a fake drug rate of less than 1 percent, although a recent spate of fake cholesterol, schizophrenia and cancer drugs in Europe has raised concerns that criminals are spreading their net.

NO CONTROLS

The INCB, which will address the problem at its next session in November, has called on governments to do more enforce existing legislation. But tackling the criminal trade is difficult.

“The Internet provides a perfect channel because there is no national control mechanism, there is no quality assurance and there is nobody who is going to ask where you got the supply,” Wieser-Herbeck said.

Properly regulated, Internet pharmacies can provide a valuable service by increasing competition and offering access to treatments in underserved areas.

But all too often the online world is a Wild West of spam e-mails and hard-to-trace suppliers.

A global survey last month by U.S.-based brand protection firm MarkMonitor found only four of 3,160 online pharmacies studied were accredited as Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites, the industry standard.

And average prices for six top-selling drugs on the non-accredited sites were 75 percent cheaper than on approved ones, suggesting most products were dubious.

Wieser-Herbeck said many bogus drugs appeared to originate in Asia, especially China, whose image has been badly tarnished recently by a range of product safety scares.

In July, China executed its former head of the State Food and Drug Administration for corruption and dereliction of duty. Later the same month, 15 members of a crime ring were arrested for selling fake drugs, including a counterfeit rabies vaccine.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909