Pharmaceutical Chicanery: Snake Oil Vendors of the Modern Era

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/299902?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Are you sure you know what you are getting inside that box of prescription medicine? Two recent newspaper articles have offered very interesting and varying perspectives into a disturbing growing international trend in the pharmaceutical industry.


Misrepresentation in the pharmaceutical industry is nothing new of course, likely as old as the industry itself. Historical anecdotes abound of snake oil charlatans and magic elixir peddlers. What distinguishes the current trend of marketplace fraud and counterfeiting, however, is its apparent swelling ubiquity.


Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post reports that India, which has grown into the world's largest manufacturer of generic pharmaceutical drugs, has also become a thriving center for counterfeit and substandard medicine. Slickly packaged and often labeled with the names of legitimate multinational drug companies, the fake drugs are passed off as the real thing to Indian consumers and even sold abroad in several developing nations. Fraudulent tactics include using lesser amounts of the medicinal ingredients as noted on the packaging, filling vials of supposed liquid medicine with water, and recycling expired medicine by simply pasting new expiry date labels onto the box.

The practice is becoming so widespread in India that some estimates peg the amount of counterfeit and substandard drugs as high as a quarter of the entire industry. This is in stark contrast, however, to the Indian government's own conservative estimate around half a percent, an obvious attempt to downplay the severity of the issue. In any case, officials in the country are noting that the shady black market industry is tarnishing the reputation of India's budding pharmaceutical industry which, in addition to production for domestic use, also seeks wider export markets in Latin America and Africa. Within the last year, both Nigeria and Sri Lanka have had to deal with issues arising from fake or substandard Indian medicine. The Nigerian incident was a strange one, involving Chinese manufacturers slapping 'Made in India' labels onto the shipment.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/299902?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#ixzz14YSvSfvh

[Catshrink]

1. Something to share with a teabagger when they talk about deregulation