Q: What led you to get involved in the issue of counterfeit drugs?
As a longtime investigative journalist specializing in health care, I got a tip from a source in the Federal Government. It was 2002, and he suggested that I investigate¹ why counterfeit drugs were landing on the nation’s pharmacy shelves. This surprised me, as I had previously thought that counterfeits were exclusively buyer beware drugs – only a danger to consumers if they purchased the drugs in less regulated markets or over the Internet. What I learned stunned me; that consumers who paid top dollar and went to their trusted pharmacies for life-saving medicine could end up getting a counterfeit drug. I spent the next three years reporting exclusively on the problem.

Q: There have been various documentaries, reports and publications on the subject yet the majority of people still seem to only connect the issue of counterfeiting with handbags and other luxury items – is the life-threatening problem of counterfeit drugs getting enough media coverage?
Perhaps the only measure of what constitutes enough media coverage is whether we’ve solved the problem – and we haven’t yet. Since my book came out, there have been improvements in the supply chain, but counterfeits are still reaching consumers through trusted sources like their pharmacies and hospitals.

Q: Name three things that need to be done to prevent the production and dissemination of counterfeit drugs?

• We need a transparent supply chain. Buyers and sellers need to know where the drugs have come from. Full disclosure of a drug’s origin needs to be a requirement, not an option.
• We need an overhaul of the nation’s laws, with severe criminal penalties for adulterating or counterfeiting drugs, as well as for falsifying pedigree information.
• We need to eliminate the secondary drug wholesalers that don’t supply end users, and do little more than sell drugs back and forth amongst themselves.

Q: In your book Dangerous Doses, wholesalers feature as a major link in the chain that ends with counterfeit pharmaceuticals being administered to patients – what can the legitimate wholesalers do to prevent their operations from being “tarred with the same brush” as the illegitimate ones? How can they be involved in the fight against counterfeit and salvage their profession?
This is a very important question. I was surprised and heartened by how many legitimate regional and mid-sized wholesalers embraced my book, in part because of their frustration at being associated with unscrupulous wholesalers. I believe these companies must offer their customers complete transparency as to where they purchase their drugs from, and educate them as to the risks of purchasing from wholesalers who can’t – or refuse to – spell out the origin of their drugs.

Q: Will the new Democrat administration get to grips better with the problem of counterfeit drugs in the US?
One hopes, but this is hard to say. Congressman Stephen Israel (D-NY) introduced a Federal bill several years ago, “Tim Fagan’s Law²,” named for a boy in his district who got counterfeit Epogen from a CVS Procare Pharmacy. It is the kind of comprehensive bill that could really tackle this problem on a Federal level – rather than leaving us with a piecemeal state-by-state solution. At the time, he could not get any Republican co-sponsors. Let’s hope for a more bipartisan solution to the problem.