Fake medicine is found particularly in the world’s developing countries, where the buyers often are poor people who have no way of knowing that the medicine they buy in good faith is, at best, ineffective, and at worst, fatal. The perfect-looking pills in apparently original packaging may contain cement, talcum, rat poison, baking powder or pesticides.
One example is malaria medicine, which can mean the difference between life and death and which is often fake. Each year, counterfeit malaria medicine kills 200,000 people.

The profit is greater than that from the narcotics trade, the risk is minimal and production costs are low.

According to the Pharma Security Institute (PSI), 2003 cases of counterfeit medicines were reported in 2009, involving 800 different medical products. The global market for counterfeit medicines is especially lucrative and the problem increases in step with the profit.
The profit is greater than that from the narcotics trade, the risk is minimal and production costs are low.

The WHO estimates that fake medicine comprises up to 25% of total drug sales in developing countries and that the situation is even worse in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, where between 30% and 60% of all medical products sold are fakes.

In the Western world only an estimated 1% of all drug products are fake. The US-based Center for Medicine in the Public Interest estimates that the sale of counterfeit medicines will earn USD 75 billion in 2010, while the World Customs Organisation estimates USD 300 billion.

Counterfeit medicines kill millions of people every year. But no one knows how many people actually die, since there are no reliable figures and no systematic methods for uncovering the fraudulent activity. It is extremely difficult to catch those responsible and, in many countries, it is even more difficult to prosecute them.

Counterfeit medicines have been around for decades. But they were given a tremendous boost in the 1990s with the explosion of the Internet. At first the problem was most significant in Western countries, where lifestyle drugs such as potency pills, steroids and weight-loss pills were attractive for the producers of illegal drugs. Then, however, the focus spread to the world’s poorer countries, where fake antibiotics and painkillers are bestsellers.Counterfeit medicines have a huge impact in areas other than human health: they are a serious menace to drug producers. The most obvious threat is loss of income, but trust in their brands is also affected, the very brands that are supposed to signify products that consumers can trust.

After a rather slow start, the pharmaceutical sector has begun to act against the criminals, assaulting them on various fronts, with increasingly sophisticated methods. These include hologram packaging, tamperproof packaging, hidden codes and DNA strings. Always in pursuit of counterfeiters. In the future, every individual package of medicine will have to carry a unique number that can be tracked throughout the supply chain and that an individual pharmacy can check in a central database. There is no doubt that national authorities and purchasing organisations will require unique codes within a few years. France is at the forefront, requiring that pharmaceutical companies give each individual package a 2D data matrix code as of 2011. This is the first step in requiring that all medical products must have a unique code. The profit is greater than that from the narcotics trade, the risk is minimal and production costs are low.

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