‘Made in India,’ Faked in China

China is implicated in key fake-drug rings recently broken up across the Middle East and Latin America. Beijing must do more to clamp down on the entire fake industry, which flourishes within its borders.

Roger Bate a Legatum Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Tom Woods President of Woods International write an excellent article in The American, the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute about the huge role that China is playing in polluting the pharmaceutical supply chains around the globe by producing massive amounts of fake drugs that often times with lethal consequences.

Mr. Bate, a long time favorite of Secure Pharma Chain, along with Mr. Woods once again provides insightful analysis into one of the most insidious and deadly crimes of the 21st century.

Highlights of The American article include:

• Chinese manufacturers are faking drugs, endangering patients' lives, and undermining legitimate brands, especially those from India. Indian companies provide vast amounts of generic drugs to mid-income and developing nations. By some estimates, 80 percent of HIV drugs for the developing world come from India, and probably half the anti-malarials and antibiotics, too.

• From the counterfeiters' perspective, faking Indian drugs makes sense. Even in those categories where Indian products do not dominate the market, they may still be copied. In part this is because Western brand owners are more likely to go after those faking their brands, whereas Indian drug makers have smaller margins and hence spend less on brand enforcement.

• Criminals often manage to bypass… inspections by inserting their fake versions further along the distribution chain. So more often tip-offs from underworld contacts, probably disaffected parts of criminal networks, provide the greatest likelihood of intercepting fakes.

• Of course, sometimes the fakes make it to market, often with lethal effect. In 2009, our Nigerian colleague Thompson Ayodele came across another fake of an Indian drug in a Lagos pharmacy, this time an antibiotic. Later, we found out it too had been made in China. It is impossible to know how many patients had taken this fake antibiotic before authorities were alerted.

• Chinese gangs do not discriminate—every major drug company and every country has probably had drugs faked by the Chinese. China is implicated in key fake-drug rings recently broken up across the Middle East and Latin America. In fact, Chinese operators will fake in or for any location and they will fake anything popular. Take Artesunat, the brand of a Vietnamese anti-malarial made by the Ho Chi Minh–based company Mekophar Chemical Pharmaceutical, which is also widely faked. Ongoing research shows that fake Artesunat was found in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Thailand; and it was all the handiwork of Chinese counterfeiters.

• Beijing must do more to clamp down on the entire fake industry, which flourishes within its borders.

Clearly China has become the primary incubator and exporter of the counterfeiting drug trade which now stretches beyond the globe. China must do more to protect supply chains from a criminal act that can cause death and create health care catastrophes among entire populations. All members of the pharmaceutical supply chain must take proactive steps to interdict and eradicate these deadly fakes and protect the consumer.

To read Mr. Bate and Mr. Woods article, visit: http://www.american.com/archive/2010/december/made-in-india-faked-in-china

To learn more about pharmaceutical anti-counterfeiting technologies, visit: http://www.xstreamsystems.net/