Parents of Woman Who Died After Cosmetic Enhancement Want Murder Charges

A young New York mother is dead and her family is demanding answers after she received injections to enhance her buttocks, CBS News reports. Latesha Bynum, 32, went to a “doctor” practicing out of an apartment in the Gramercy Park neighborhood in New York. Within hours of having the procedure, Ms. Bynum had to be…

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Lester Holt of NBC News Finds Fentanyl for Sale Online After 5-Minute Search

Google search conducted on August 29, 2017 at 11:51am PST In a television report for NBC Nightly News, Lester Holt and his investigative team were able to find Chinese-made, bulk fentanyl powder for sale on the Internet after searching for “buy fentanyl” online. When his crew sent an enquiry email to one of the listed…

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US Will Be Exposed to Counterfeits From Weak European Drug Security Warns Expert

In early July, European authorities reported that counterfeit versions of Omnitrope, a drug containing human growth hormone, were found in France, Denmark, and Mexico. The counterfeit Omnitrope was designed to look like it was made by a large drug manufacturer, but it contained no active ingredient. Shortly thereafter, German authorities announced that a fake version of a schizophrenia drug, Xeplion, was discovered in Germany. The Xeplion was also a knock-off, mimicking packaging used in Bulgaria and Romania.

These incidents are the latest in a stream of reports about counterfeit drugs throughout Europe. The problem lies in lax security of the supply chain — distributors, middlemen and wholesalers between the drug maker and the consumer. Despite ongoing problems with the EU drug supply chain, Congress is currently considering a bill that would open the U.S. to imports from the EU and elsewhere. We can’t have a serious debate about drug importation without understanding what is going on in Europe.

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National Boards of Pharmacy Finds only 4.2% of Online Pharmacies Are Safe

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) has just released their Internet Drug Outlet Identification Program Progress Report for State and Federal Regulators: August 2017, outlining the current state of fake online pharmacies that sell to U.S. patients.

Out of 11,688 Internet drug outlets reviewed, the NABP found that 11,142 (95.8%) were “operating out of compliance with state and federal laws and/or NABP patient safety and pharmacy standard practices.”

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Health Policy Expert: “Why Cheaper Drugs Can Kill”

Health policy expert Kenneth Thorpe weighs in on the dangers of drug importation in this August 23, 2017 editorial in U.S. News & World Report:

“…these savings could come at the cost of Americans’ lives. Legalizing drug importation would make it far easier for harmful counterfeit and contaminated medicines to enter the U.S. drug supply. At a time when illegal, counterfeit drugs already cause hundreds of American deaths every year, importation represents a reckless way to cut health care costs.”

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Deadly counterfeit pills in Louisiana

Deadly counterfeit pills in Louisiana This problem affects the whole country. Read more about the fake pill crisis.Since as early as 2015, drug traffickers have been selling North Americans counterfeit medications made from fentanyl, a dangerous painkiller 25-40 times stronger than heroin, and even stronger synthetic opioids like carfentanil.  More recently, pill counterfeiters are using…

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Bioworld: Importation a cliché, not a CAPA

Mari Serebrov, the regulatory editor for biotechnology news site BioWorld, offered this opinion about drug importation on August 4, 2017.  

“On the surface, importing drugs from Canada seems like a no-brainer,” she writes, “especially when the Canadian version is virtually the same drug as the one approved by the FDA for the U.S. market – except a whole lot cheaper. But there’s the rub. How can Congress ensure that drugs imported from Canada are all that they claim to be?

While more than 40 countries have or are implementing security measures to protect their drug supply chain, Canada’s not one of them, Brian Daleiden, vice president of industry marketing at Tracelink Inc., told BioWorld. That puts importation – from Canada, at least – on a collision course with the U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), which Congress passed in 2013 as part of the Drug Quality and Security Act.”

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Physician: Sanders’ drug proposal comes with serious costs

The Daily Herald published this editorial by Dr. Terry Sellers about the shortcomings of drug importation as policy on July 25th, 2017. Sellers is a Utah-based physician specializing in addiction.

“… price is not the same as cost,” he writes, “In this case, cheaper prices will impose tremendous costs that would adversely affect the future of medicine for generations to come.” 

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